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10 years of painting people’s cars

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On this day ten years ago, the former State of President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki officially opened the multi-million rand Paint Shop at the Volkswagen’s manufacturing factory in Uitenhage.

The state of the art of paint shop was initially designed to paint at least 450 car bodies per day. Ten years later, the facility has increased 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.

Since the 1st of December 2006, the Volkswagen Paint Shop 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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Alan Straton

Chief Cook, Bottle Washer and Broom Mechanic at MyPE
Passionate about Port Elizabeth and definitely NOT packing for Perth. Alan's ethos is epitomised in the words of Nelson Mandela; "I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society. If need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." See more articles by Alan.