You Can't Blame Volkswagen for Trying

On Tuesday, Volkswagen announced its plan to assemble 600,000 electric vehicles utilizing the brand’s MEB platform at two plants in China. The facilities, said to be located in the cities of Anting and Foshan, will help bolster EV volume after the completion of VW’s Zwickau plant in Germany — which the company previously claimed would manufacture 330,000 cars annually.

While that facility is nearing completion and supposed to be up and running before 2020, there’s no firm timeline in place for China. But that’s the least of the issues Volkswagen must solve in order to make this dream a reality.

On the same day as the factory announcement, VW also doubled its previous estimate of the number of battery cells it would have to acquire to become the world’s leader in electrification. The company now believes it will need to source more than 300 gigawatt hours of annual supply in 2025 just to support Europe and Asia. However, this has as much to do with a new mandate from the European Union (which requires automakers to reduce CO2 emissions by 37.5 percent by 2030, vs 2021 levels) as it does Volkswagen’s own ambitions.

Unlike the United States, where discussions are still ongoing, officials in Europe and China have basically decided that the internal combustion engine has to go. This seems to suit the modern-day version of VW Group just fine. VW’s supervisory board already agreed to build a 1 billion euro ($1.12 billion) battery plant in Salzgitter, Germany, not far from the Zwickau plant, on Monday. The facility will be a joint operation between VW and Swedish partner Northvolt, with a completion date of 2022.

“Volkswagen leads the competition on e-mobility,” CEO Herbert Diess said at the company’s annual meeting in Berlin. “As a company we’ll make a success of the electric car — with the right products, superior underpinnings and global economies of scale.”

According to Automotive News, Volkswagen doesn’t intend to stop here, and is already considering sites for additional EV factories. While this unquestionably proves the firm’s commitment to electrification, it could easily spark anxiety. Numerous media outlets are framing this as VW’s push to surpass Tesla. And yet VW’s first ground-up electric car hasn’t seen the same kind of enthusiasm as product born of the American outfit.

Thus far, Volkswagen’s ID3 hatchback has amassed more than 15,000 pre-orders from customers putting down 1,000-euro deposits. Meanwhile, Tesla’s Model 3 averaged 1,800 new orders a day in its introductory year and is presently trying to expand in both Europe and Asia. All told, Volkswagen intends to spend 30 billion euros ($34 billion) to surpass Tesla as the world’s biggest electric-vehicle manufacturer. For its sake, we hope the effort pays off.

[Image: Volkswagen]