Volkswagen’s US unit has started recruiting engineers and technicians for its new Chattanooga, Tennesee based engineering and planning centre, according to local reports.
VW Group of America executive vice president Matthias Erb told timesfreepress.com hiring has started for about 130 staff who will work at the centre and they begin moving next week into a vacant building near the assembly plant that will temporarily house the centre.
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A new structure is planned but no more details were provided.
Eventually the centre will employ a minimum of 200 engineers and technicians which Erb hopes will centralise VW’s engineering and planning in North America.
The automaker now has six locations in the US and one in Mexico where it has design and technical centres, a research lab and other similar operations. The Chattanooga site would coordinate that work in the future.
“We’ll be moving over research and development functions,” Erb told timesfreepress.com at the plant. “This will be the central entity in all the US and hopefully all of North America.”
Erb also said officials would like the new facility to centralise VW’s activities with universities nationwide.
He said most of the planning, engineering and research and development operations for automakers in the US is based in Michigan and Ohio.
With the opening of the Chattanooga centre, Erb expects parts suppliers will bring more of their R&D work to the area as well.
VW will be hiring design, electrical and mechanical engineers.
The report noted VW announced the engineering and planning centre last summer as part of the US$900m expansion at Chattanooga (which currently builds the NAFTA markets Passat) to make a new midsize sport utility vehicle. It already plans to hire 2,000 more workers in Chattanooga to help assemble that vehicle.
Now the automaker is seeking approval from the city to add another 130,153 sq ft to the factory expansion in order to increase its body shop. That will boost the size of the original plant expansion by about 25%, costing nearly $18m more, VW said.
Plant spokesman Scott Wilson told timesfreepress.com the company has chosen “to exercise the financially responsible option to increase the size of the body shop expansion now to accommodate current and future production needs”.
