What happened to it?
Failed in the 80s. Became a Sony tv plant. Now it’s empty.
They hired GM people to run it and brought in the UAW.
Not a recipe for success.
They shut it down. It made the Rabbit and other small cars. In the 80's Volkswagen almost got driven out of the U.S. market by Japanese and U.S. competition so the factory was closed. Plus at the time VW was big into developing nations. And there were labor issues and management issues.
What happened to it?
I happen to work at what's left of that plant. From 1988 to 1995, it sat idle. They bid out the rights to strip out the machinery and furnishings. A Chinese company won the bid. Then Sony came in with the incentives to rebuild it and make big screen televisions. It operated well until it became clear the 20 year incentives were not going to be renewed and the business was changing anyway.
Fortunately, our part of the company was only peripherally involved in the television business and was sold to ANOTHER company (my present employer) who liked what they saw with the staff here and offered almost all of us seamless employment contracts. So we occupy about 1/8th of the space of that plant and employ about 150 at a location which once employed over 4,000 (with Sony) and, I heard, more than double that number (with Volkswagen).
Such are the wages of dealing with the U.A.W. before 1988 and with even a non-union company which thought it would be stylish to have a foreign C.E.O. who was good at little more than brown-nosing.
What happened to VW Westmorland?
They closed & moved the operation to Mexico where labor was cheaper.