​Volkswagen has proudly handed over its two millionth electric vehicle to a nice German lady called Kirsten. 

The carmaker held a informal ceremony at its ‘Transparent Factory’ in Dresden to give Frau Vormbrock her new ID.3 in a fetching shade of metallic blue. 

Dresden’s glassy so-called Transparent Factory sits in the middle of the east German city in the corner of a park and was originally built in 2002 for production of Volkswagen’s ill-fated and over-engineered Phaeton posh limo. The company infamously lost around £20,000 on every car sold. 

The factory eventually shifted to electric car production, and you could see the cars being made through the extensive glazing as you drove past the facility. 

The assembly line was controversially shut down at the end of 2025 as part of Volkswagen’s efforts to save money, and the Transparent Factory is being repurposed as a visitor attraction to promote EVs.

Volkswagen has sold two million electric vehicles since its first effort went on sale back in 2013 in the form of the Volkswagen e-Up city car. That model and the equally delightful e-Golf were electric versions of existing combustion-engined models, before the bespoke electric ID-badged models came along in 2020. 

The ID.3 was the first of these, and despite some issues with the terrible infotainment (now mostly addressed) it has been a successful car, though it’s the larger ID.4 SUV that’s taken almost half of those two million sales since it went on the market in 2021. 

Now the two strategies are converging, as Volkswagen is set to bring the ID.Polo to showrooms in 2026 on a bespoke electric platform that uses an existing nameplate. 

Which is all to celebrate Volkswagen’s impressive achievement, but to put it into context Chinese carmaker BYD sold 2.3 million electric vehicles just in 2025. BYD became the largest seller of EVs in 2025, overtaking Tesla, while VW is the second largest carmaker in the world taking in all powertrains – it’s still got a long way to go before all nine million of those sales are electric. 

Halting production at the Transparent Factory has been controversial for VW – the first time it's closed a facility on German soil