Transparent Factory
car factory and exhibition space in Dresden, Germany
The Transparent Factory was a car factory and exhibition space in Dresden, Germany owned by German carmaker Volkswagen (through Volkswagen Sachsen GmbH subsidiary) and designed by architect Gunter Henn of the Henn GmbH firm. It originally opened in 2002, producing the Volkswagen Phaeton until 2016. As of 2017, it produced the electric version of the Golf. The ID.3 was the last car produced there, from January 2021 until the factory's closure in December 2025.
The original German name is Gläserne Manufaktur (meaning factory made of glass). Both the German and English names are a word play on the double meaning of transparent and glassy, referring to both optical transparency and transparency of the production process.
Car factory
The factory originally assembled Volkswagen's luxury sedan, the Phaeton. It used 60,000 magnets in its fully automated assembly line. Spare capacity was also used to build Bentley Continental Flying Spur vehicles destined for the European market until 2006, when all work was transferred to Bentley's plant in Crewe, England. Production of the Bentley Flying Spur resumed in late 2013.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Transparent Factory” is car factory and exhibition space in Dresden, Germany. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Transparent, Factory and factory, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q516226. Authority coordinates are 51.045, 13.756. 1 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 2 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2002, 2016, 2017 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Transparent Factory” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.