Volkswagen’s newest factory will build 17 vehicles per hour, 380 vehicles per day and around 100,000 vehicles each year.

The new Volkswagen Crafter factory in Wrzesnia, Poland

Located in Września, Poland, the new factory is dedicated to the production of the Volkswagen Crafter and its badge-engineered peer, the MAN TGE van. The factory was completed in just 23 months, from breaking ground in November 2014 until the start of production in October.

It’s an impressive lesson in how rapidly the big automotive manufacturers can deploy new production capacity. But what was involved in the creation of this plant? Here are a few numbers:

• The plant occupies an area of 220 hectares, or around 300 football fields
• During excavation, approx. 1,000,000 m³ of soil was moved with 50,000 trips by dump trucks.
• 22,000 metric tonnes of structural steel and 8,000 tonnes of reinforcing steel were used.
• 50,000 m³ of concrete was poured by 6,000 cement trucks.
• 4,000 foundation pilings were rammed 16 metres into the ground.
• 15,000 metres of utility pipe was laid in the plant.
• 19,000 training sessions were performed in the framework of occupational safety.
• In the ramp-up phase, approx. 3,500 (construction) workers were employed at the plant construction site in Września.
• 45 suppliers from Poland supply the plant
• Now that the plant is complete, around 3,000 employees will work a three-shift system

The new Crafter also promises to be impressive and supremely flexible. The Września factory will build a total of 69 Crafter derivatives. The Crafter will be available with a maximum gross weight of up to 5.5 tonnes and in panel format up to 7.4m long.

Given that the population of the town of Września is only 30,000, one images that this new factory will have a big impact on the local economy as well as the landscape.

What we don’t yet know is if the new Crafter — the first model to be an in-house design, rather than a rebadged Sprinter — have a similar impact on the van market.