VW in call for battery unity
VOLKSWAGEN wants German and European industry to come together to help create a regional supplier of electric car batteries to provide competition to Asian manufacturers, the head of its core car division said.
Europe’s largest car maker and German rival Daimler became the latest manufacturers this week to announce plans to speed up their shift to zeroemissions motoring.
Volkswagen (VW) now aims to have 80 electric models by 2025, and says it will need four times the capacity of US electric car maker Tesla’s “gigafactory” to supply their batteries.
While European companies assemble battery packs for electric cars, the region has no significant player in battery cells – the essential building blocks for the batteries that are currently mostly manufactured in Asia.
“It would be desirable for the German and European industry to play a stronger role here,” VW brand chief executive Herbert Diess said.
His comments came after Europe’s auto suppliers’ association warned a fixation on electric cars risked damaging its industry because of Asia’s dominance in battery technology.
Assembly of electric car content including battery cells would become one of the major growth areas in the coming decades, Diess said in an interview at the Frankfurt motor show.
He left open whether VW, which buys its battery cells from South Korea’s LG Chem and Samsung, would join a potential European consortium.
“For the initial phase, I still feel in good hands with the Korean suppliers, but I would appreciate if competition were to grow and a European consortium would emerge,” Diess said. –