Volkswagen’s Car Towers at Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany
The Autostadt is a
visitor attraction adjacent to the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg,
Germany, with a prime focus on automobiles. It features a museum,
feature pavilions for the principal automobile brands in the Volkswagen
Group, a customer centre where customers can pick up new cars, and take a
tour through the enormous factory, a guide to the evolution of roads,
and cinema in a large sphere. One of the prime attraction at the
Autostadt is the two gleaming car parking towers of glass and galvanized
steel where cars are automatically moved from the Wolfsburg plant and
on to the customer centre where they are collected by their owners.
Each
tower is 60 meter tall and houses 400 cars each and are the heart of
vehicle delivery at the Autostadt. The two towers are connected to the
Volkswagen factory by a 700 metre underground tunnel. A conveyor belt
system transports finished cars directly from the adjacent manufacturing
plant to the towers' basement. From there they are lifted into position
via mechanical arms that rotate and run along a central beam, moving
vehicles in and out of their bays at a speed of two meters per second.
When a customer purchases a car from Autostadt the car is picked from
the silo and transported out to the customer without having driven a
single meter, and the odometer is thus on "0".
Visitors
can explore the tower via a panoramic glass elevator, and are
eventually taken to an observation deck on the twentieth floor, giving a
view of the factory, the town of Wolfsburg and the surrounding
countryside.
Last year 175,893 new cars were handed over to
their new owners. Currently, 37% of new VW buyers from Germany pick up
their new vehicle from Wolfsburg, and there is space to build two more
high-tech towers should that figure increase.
