HERNDON, VA—Volkswagen Group of America Inc. and Redwood Materials Inc. are collaborating to create a supply chain to recycle Volkswagen and Audi electric vehicle batteries in the United States.

Up until a few decades ago, instrument panels in most vehicles consisted of a smattering of simple analog buttons, dials, gauges, knobs and needles. Today, mechanical speedometers and tachometers have gone the way of bench seats, hood ornaments, hub caps and running boards.

You can’t accuse Volkswagen’s Dirk Voigt of having his head in the clouds—he’ll take it as a compliment. The head of digital production at VW, Voigt and a team of manufacturing and IT pros are developing an industrial cloud computing system to amalgamate production data from more than 120 factories. The objective: greater efficiency and lower costs.

Automotive OEMs love to show off their automated body-in-white assembly lines. Commercials invariably feature dozens of six-axis robots producing showers of sparks in choreographed routines. 

Like many long-established car manufacturers, the company that would become Škoda Auto started in the early 1890s by making bicycles. Today, you won’t see velocipedes rolling off of Škoda assembly lines, but you just might see plug-in electric vehicles.

STUTTGART, Germany— Mercedes-Benz’s experimental electric car, the Vision EQXX, broke its own efficiency record in June, travelling 747 miles from Stuttgart, Germany, to Silverstone, UK, on a single battery charge.

WASHINGTON—Siemens will invest $54 million across several key U.S. manufacturing facilities that serve critical infrastructure markets.

KARLSRUHE, Germany—Chemical recycling of mixed plastic waste is both technically feasible and environmentally and financially promising, according to new research from Audi and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

DETROIT— UVeye, a provider of advanced vehicle diagnostic systems, has received an investment from the capital venture arm of General Motors, GM Ventures, to help fund the development and commercialization of the company’s vehicle inspection technology. 

Most manufacturers agree that digital transformation is necessary to remain competitive today and thrive tomorrow. Many large companies have already begun initiatives. But, when asked to quantify the impact of those initiatives on the bottom line, they often come up short.