Wolfsburg celebrates a decade of Autostadt

Mar 16, 2010, 11:26 GMT

Wolfsburg, Germany - Six visitors take their places in the glass cabin and fasten their seatbelts before the door slowly closes.

In one movement the cabin lifts off the ground before racing to a height of 48 metres, giving the occupants a fantastic view of Autostadt Wolfsburg's two 20-storey-high and fully automatic car silos where new Volkswagen cars sit neatly packed in boxes like children's toys.

'Four hundred cars can be stored in these glass and metal silos for a maximum of 24 hours before being collected by their new owners,' explains the tour guide in Autostadt, the visitor attraction adjacent to the Volkswagen factory in the northern German city.

'Thanks to an ingenious automated system, the different models can be taken from their bays and brought to ground level within seconds.'

From there, the cars roll down a tunnel to the customer centre.

However, not every visitor to Autostadt is here to collect a new car. Sean, for example, has travelled from Frankfurt to see what has become a major tourist attraction over the last decade.

From his high vantage point, Sean gets a good view of Wolfsburg's city centre, the many attractions of which are to be found on a 2.5-kilometre-long axis designed by city planner Peter Koller, who was responsible for the city's reconstruction after World War II.

The axis goes from Klieversberg in the south of the city, along the Porschestrasse with its art museum, Alvar-Aalto cultural building and science centre. Continuing on, visitors then reach the Autostadt visitor attraction and the Schloss Wolfsburg fortress.

Wolfsburg was founded by the Nazis as a 'Kraft durch Freude' (Strength through Joy) city in 1938, just a year before the outbreak of war.

'The real development actually began on May 25, 1945 as Wolfsburg was named after the fortress and the city enjoyed a new start,' explains city mayor Rolf Schnellecke.

'The decision of the occupying British Army not to dismantle the Volkswagen factory was the start of the triumphal rise of the VW Beetle and with it the growth of the city.'

The idea for Autostadt began in 1994 when VW decided to open its factory to its customers and the public so they could see the stages of production of the company's vehicles in order to add 'emotion' to the procedure of collecting a car.

Autostadt eventually opened its doors six years later on the north bank of the Mittellandkanal bordering the VW factory.

A pedestrian bridge over the canal allows visitors to reach the city centre and main train station within minutes. The largest glass doors in the world, which rise to a height of 19 metres, open the way to a piazza.

A major attraction is the the Zeithaus where classic cars of the last 120 years, milestones in the history of the automobile, are exhibited.

Old-timers from all over the world are on view, beginning with the first ever car built by Karl Benz in 1886, moving on to the legendary Ford Tin Lizzy, the Borgward Isabella and the first models of what has become known as 'Generation Golf.'