Staff photo by Brett Clark--Enterprise South is one of the sites Volkswagon officials are considering for its first U.S. plant.
Volkswagen’s management favors Huntsville in northern Alabama as the site for its new U.S. car plant, according to the German publication Automobilwoche.
The magazine, sister publication of Automotive News, said Chattanooga is the second choice.
Automobilwoche cited sources with direct contact to management board members.
It said VW chief executive Martin Winterkorn and the car maker’s head of production, Jochen Heizmann, are expected make a final recommendation Monday.
VW’s supervisory board will make a decision on the plant site the following day.
Earlier, VW said it had narrowed its search for a location for the plant to Alabama, Tennessee and Michigan.
VW is planning a U.S. plant to help reach its ambition of more than tripling its annual U.S. sales by 2018 to 1 million, including 800,000 VW brand and 200,000 Audi sales.
See tomorrow’s Chattanooga Times Free Press for complete coverage.
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Gosh, what are they thinking? Where would you rather live? Chattanooga wins that one hands down. Beautiful city. Of course, there are some inconveniences, like not being able to even buy a bottle of cooking sherry at the grocery store. The Tennessee legislature should update some of those antiquated laws that make this seem like a backward state.
Why would they want to build in TN? A state where the governor had to lay off state employees because the state is broke. TN needs to wake up and come into the 21st century. There may not be a state income tax, but the locals will tax you death.
I believe TN was used from the start to get Alabama to pay top dollar for the VW plant. They're known to overpay for plants, and have been rumored to offer $1billion for VW. So is that responsible? Meantime, it's a bit ironic that VW, which prides itself on being green stewards of the environment, will choose to contribute to sprawl by locating a plant 20 miles from the nearest big city. If they had chosen Chattanooga, an emerging green city, they would have shown how true they are to their word by developing on a reclaimed brownfield. So I guess I'll be shopping for that Acura or BMW instead of a new VW after all.
Why would VW choose Huntsville over Chattanooga you ask? Huntsville is well known as being a high tech city full of engineers and highly skilled workers. With NASA, Marshall Space Flight Center, defense contractors as well as numerous research and development companies the better question would be "why wouldn't VW choose Huntsville." Chattanooga may be known for tourism but that's about it.