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VWSA's Uitenhage Paint Shop celebrates 10 years

Dec 02, 2016 VWSA, Volkswagen, Paint Shop, Polo



VW's Paint Shop has just celebrated its 10th anniversary.

The Uintenhage facility was initially designed to paint at least 450 car bodies per day, but has over time expanded its capacity to paint almost 750 Polo and Polo Vivo bodies per day. In the past decade, the Paint Shop has painted the car bodies in 35 different colours, and since 1st of December 2006, the  has painted over 895 700 car bodies. The colour capacity of the Volkswagen’s Paint Shop includes two types of primer, 14 base coat colours and a clear coat component.

The Paint Shop has also contributed significantly to the Think Blue. Factory initiative at Volkswagen. Think Blue.Factory is a Volkswagen Group’s global initiative where the production plants across the world are encouraged to reduce waste, water usage, energy consumption and emissions by 25%. In the past six year, the Uitenhage Paint Shop has significantly reduced the energy consumption per car by 30%, water usage by 65%, waste by 71%, VOC by 17% and CO2 by 54%.

“The paint process is one of the complex and most important manufacturing processes. In the past ten years, we have geared our paint shop to consistently produce high quality paint standards on all our car bodies for local and international customers. This state of the art facility is an important component of our preparations for the future models that we will be producing at our Uitenhage factory,” said Thomas Schaefer, Chairman and Managing Director: Volkswagen Group South Africa.

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