The World’s Largest Engine Plant is Slowly Switching to Electrification

Nestled just across the Austrian border, Győr, Hungary, is home to a modest population of about 130,000 people, but it plays an outsized role in the country’s economy.

It’s here, halfway between Vienna and Budapest, where Audi runs the world’s largest engine plant — an operation so massive it’s the country’s second largest exporter behind only its state-owned energy company. It’s also where the brand’s past, present, and future coalesce, with the switch to full-scale electrification happening in real-time at this mammoth facility just five kilometres from Győr’s city hall.

Humble Beginnings

It’s an interesting location if only for the way it contrasts that wonderfully ornate municipal building, with the various structures at the Audi site fitting together like industrial-scale Tetris blocks compared to the Baroque Revival city hall that was built just before the turn of the 20th century. The location started more modestly than what stands today, with just 82 employees when it opened in 1993 — a far cry from the more than 12,000 who work here today. The facility itself has grown in size, too, and now covers more than six times the original area at roughly 5.1 million square metres (55 million square feet).

There’s been plenty of change in the intervening years, with the first four-cylinder engines joined by V6s and V8s, followed by the 12-cylinder diesel that never made its way to North America but became legendary nonetheless for being the only engine of its kind in a production vehicle. There were also V10 engines that powered the likes of the awesome Audi R8 and Lamborghini Gallardo, although in the case of the latter the components were shipped to Italy for final assembly.

Along the way, the site also picked up full-scale vehicle production, starting with the compact A3, as well as the stamping of components for some of the Volkswagen Group’s so-called widebody models. Those currently include virtually every one of Audi’s high-performance RS models, as well as certain Lamborghini and Bentley body parts.

Sitewide Sustainability

Through it all, Audi Hungaria, as it’s officially known, has evolved and adapted to environmental challenges. Beyond electric motor production, which kicked off at the site in 2018, the largest rooftop solar array in Europe was installed two years later. Mounted atop the twin onsite logistics buildings, the photovoltaic system spans 160,000 square metres (1.7 million square feet) and generates a maximum of 12 megawatts of solar power, all of which is pumped into the grid to cover the site’s energy needs.

Other initiatives include a massive geothermal project that helped meet 90 per cent of Audi Hungaria’s heating energy needs last year alone. Developed in partnership with PannErgy, the system relies on a trio of wells that bore deep into the earth to extract water with a temperature of 100 degrees Celsius. It travels via pipeline some 15 km to Audi Hungaria’s energy centre, where it’s used to generate electricity before being reinjected into the ground.

Even the pressurized air used in the various machinery around the Győr site comes from the energy centre, while the waste-heat that’s generated by that same equipment is recovered and used locally. It’s all helped to make Audi Hungaria carbon neutral, a designation it first earned in 2020.

More Electric Motors

By 2023, the Győr plant had already pumped out half a million electric drive axles for the likes of the Audi Q8 E-Tron. Incidentally, that’s the same year it started making electric motors for the Audi Q6 E-Tron and Porsche Macan Electric, the first two models to be built on the shared Premium Platform Electric (PPE) architecture.

Of course, the principles of the new electric motors are the same as before, but they’ve been significantly improved for this new PPE application. For starters, they weigh about 20 per cent less than the previous generation of Audi’s electric motors. They’re also more compact and only need about a third of the space of their predecessors. (That’s at least part of the reason why the Q6 E-Tron has a generously sized frunk compared to the smaller compartment under the Q8’s hood.)

Both the front asynchronous electric motors and the rear induction-type units for the Q6 E-Tron and Macan Electric are built here on an assembly line shaped like a W, with some 55 robots and more than 150 employees involved in the process. It takes a little more than three hours for each motor to be completed, with every one of them undergoing end-of-line testing for both performance and acoustics.

The test is 30 seconds long and is used to uncover potential problems before the motors leave the facility. For instance, high-frequency microphones can detect something as small as a bad bearing before that motor is shipped to Germany for final assembly — to Ingolstadt in the case of the Q6 E-Tron, and Leipzig for the Macan Electric.

While electric vehicles (EVs) are often anecdotally referred to as simple next to their internal-combustion counterparts, the motors that drive them are incredibly intricate, with each component fitting together just so and requiring at least some of the same considerations as gas engines. Vanes for cooling, for example, and even oil pumps are part of the electric equation, particularly with integrated gearbox units like the ones used by Audi and Porsche.

Final Thoughts

Audi isn’t ready to abandon internal combustion just yet, but electrification is playing an ever larger role for the automaker. Ultimately, this massive facility in the northwestern corner of Hungary is like a microcosm for the company-wide shift that’s currently underway. The building that’s home to PPE drive motor production may be small in the grand scheme of Audi Hungaria’s overall footprint, but electrification’s share of the site’s total output continues to grow.

The facility’s future includes a new electric drive unit production area for the Volkswagen Group’s forthcoming small EVs, as well as stamping electric motor housings and building rotors and electronics for them on-site. In a way, it’s not so different from how Audi Hungaria got its start more than two decades ago before transforming into what could be considered the very heart of the automaker’s global production efforts.