VW ramps up its EV plans

From Melbourne's The Age newspaper.

Volkswagen is stepping up its game to become the world’s biggest electric-car maker with a plan to build six battery factories in Europe and global investments in charging stations.

The manufacturer, which already has agreements for two sites, is exploring options for another four plants for a total capacity of 240 gigawatt-hours by the end of the decade, VW said in a statement. VW has the most comprehensive EV plan in the industry that’ll add about 50 purely battery-powered vehicles to its lineup by 2030. 

“We are now systematically integrating additional stages in the value chain,” chief executive officer Herbert Diess said. “We secure a long-term pole position in the race for the best battery.”

Emulating Tesla as well as General Motors. with a dedicated battery event dubbed “Power Day,” VW is giving the deepest dive yet on its strategy to beat a path to an electric future selling millions of EVs. Batteries have emerged as the key battleground with concerns over high costs squeezing margins and supply of raw materials such as nickel and cobalt.

VW will also invest €400 million euros ($615 million) by 2025 to build out much-needed charging infrastructure in Europe, after the region overtook China in EV sales last year. Fast-charging in Europe will grow five-fold to 18,000 stations, helped by co-operations with BP in the UK, Iberdrola and Spain and Enel in Italy as well as VW’s existing Ionity GmbH consortium.  In North America, VW is adding 3500 stations for this year and 17,000 points in China by 2025.

 

There's a bit of a suggestion in this article that, somehow, VW is going to beat Tesla.  We've heard of "Tesla killers" before and they've never been that.  Tesla is on a roll.  And it will shortly offer the Model 2 for $25,000.  The Tesla experience is like the Apple smartphone compared with the bakelite rotary dial.  Yes, the VW EVs will work.  But Teslas will have full self-driving (FSD), and even if that still takes another couple of years, you can still park, change lanes on a freeway, etc.  No other car maker has anything like that.