FILE PHOTO: Employees leave the Volkswagen (VW) plant after VW starts shutting down production in Europe amid the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Wolfsburg, Germany, late March 19, 2020. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer
BERLIN (Reuters) – Volkswagen (VOWG.DE) expects the car market in Germany to recover in the summer after the auto maker was forced to suspend output due to the coronavirus pandemic, an executive told a newspaper on Wednesday.
“We assume that Germany will return to normal in the summer,” Juergen Stackmann, management board member for the VW passenger cars brand, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
“We must learn how to live with the virus,” he said, adding that he did not expect the virus to disappear again quickly. “The standstill cannot last longer than summer … Society and the economy cannot withstand that.”
(Corrects headline and first paragraph to make clear market to normalise by summer, not car production to resume.)
Reporting by Emma Thomasson; Editing by Edmund Blair