Goals and Strategies

With the new Group strategy “NEW AUTO” – Mobility for generations to come, we are preparing ourselves for the global changes in mobility and thus driving Volkswagen’s transformation into a software-centric company.

In the context of the fast-changing environment and the challenges resulting from it, the Group Board of Management adopted the new Group strategy “NEW AUTO” – Mobility for generations to come in May 2021 with the approval of the Supervisory Board. The strategy’s focus is the world of mobility in 2030.

NEW AUTO thus continues the transformation initiated with the predecessor strategies, TOGETHER 2025 and TOGETHER 2025⁺, which kicked off one of the biggest processes of change in the Company’s history with the aim of making the Group more focused, efficient, innovative, customer-oriented and sustainable, and systematically gearing it toward profitable growth. These strategies have already provided the framework and key pillars with which we aim to achieve our vision of being a world-leading provider of sustainable mobility.

As technology advances, the automotive industry is rapidly forging ahead with the transformation toward e-mobility and digitalization. The market for electric vehicles will thus continue to grow strongly in the next few years, meaning that cost-efficient and sustainable production of battery systems and the expansion of charging infrastructure will be crucial to success.

The shift to connected, intelligent and eventually self-driving vehicles will, however, bring more wide-reaching changes for the automotive industry. Increasing software development capabilities seeking to excite customers with constantly improving digital functionality is the prerequisition for this. The most important milestone in this context is the development of autonomous driving, which will change customers’ experience of mobility forever and will additionally pave the way for new business models.

In equal measure to technological trends, the global economic and geopolitical environment is also posing increased challenges for the automotive industry. These include, for example, the economic influence of our largest mobility markets, China, the USA and Europe, and their diverging development. We anticipate that the Chinese economy will continue to gain influence and grow. The sustained growth in economic output (GDP), among other things, underlines the importance of the Asian market.

Sustainability will continue to be a recurring theme in the business world, driven by the increasingly noticeable consequences of climate change and customers’ greater awareness of sustainable lifestyles. We are committed to the Paris Agreement on climate protection, which aims to keep the increase in global temperature by 2050 to well below 2 degrees Celsius, and have set ourselves the goal of becoming a net carbon-neutral company by 2050.