Audi is currently negotiating with both politicians and its own employees about the future of the brand's only factory in Belgium. Now production has stopped.
Audi is looking for a way out of the difficult situation at the Brussels factory. The brand's only factory in Belgium and one of only two remaining factories in the whole of Belgium.
However, one thing is already clear – the employees at the factory will not be building cars for the next four weeks.
This is written by Automobilwoche .
The only model built at the factory, the Q8 e-tron, is selling so poorly that Audi wants to get rid of it prematurely. On the other side is the government of Belgium, which is trying to save the jobs that are still at the factory.
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Back at the beginning of April, Audi fired 371 of the employees at the factory. It is also the first time that the car brand has fired people in Belgium since it took over the 75-year-old factory from Volkswagen in 2010.
At the moment, there are only a few people working in the factory. These are individual office workers and janitors who keep the place tidy. Audi confirms this to the German media.
It is not at all certain that production will be restarted. In any case, the factory management has already informed the employees that the production of the Q8 e-tron, which Audi is finding very difficult to sell, may be suspended for a very long time before it was actually planned.
The leading shop steward at the factory, Franky De Schrijver, has already warned that somewhere between 1,400 and 1,500 of his colleagues stand to lose their jobs as early as October.
Incidentally, it is not the first time that Audi has stopped production at the Belgian factory. Back in October 2023, exactly the same thing happened to the Q4 model.
Actually, according to the Belga News Agency, the plan was for the factory to build at least 40,000 Q4s per year by the middle of 2026 at the latest. But even though the factory is gearing up and was set up for that, production was put on hold after a test assembly of just over 200 cars.
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