Factories don’t usually make headlines at tech conferences, but what Audi is doing inside its production labs is anything but ordinary. At VMware Explore in Las Vegas, I sat down with Dr. Henning Löser, Head of the Audi Production Lab, to talk about how the automaker is reinventing its factory floor with a software-first mindset.

Henning leads a small team he jokingly calls “the nerds of production,” but their work is changing how cars are built. Instead of replacing entire lines for every new piece of technology, Audi has found a way to bring the speed and flexibility of IT into the world of industrial automation. The result is Edge Cloud 4 Production, a system that takes virtualization technology normally reserved for data centers and applies it directly to manufacturing.

In our conversation, Henning explained why virtual PLCs may be one of the biggest breakthroughs yet. They look invisible to workers on the line but give maintenance teams new transparency and resilience. We explored how replacing thousands of industrial PCs with centralized, virtualized workloads not only reduces downtime but also cuts energy use and simplifies updates. And yes, we even discussed the day a beaver chewed through one of Audi’s fiber optic cables and how redundancy kept production running without a hitch.

This episode is about more than smart factories. It’s about how an industry known for heavy machinery is learning to think like the cloud. From scalability and sustainability to predictive maintenance and AI-ready infrastructure, Audi is showing how the car of the future starts with the factory of the future. If you’ve ever wondered how emerging technologies like virtualization and private cloud are reshaping the shop floor, this is a story you’ll want to hear.