From people’s car to electric car. From Volks to Volt. This is the sense of the sensational and yet to be officially confirmed change of the brand name. According to persistent American press sources, Volkswagen will become the Voltswagen. An epochal change that gives the measure of the transformation taking place. The name change seems to have been planned for the United States, a country where the Volkswagen brand has suffered the worst image damage due to the dieselgate.
Voltswagen, electric range
The news was anticipated by the American media CNBC, which unveiled the birth of the “Voltswagen of America” brand. The American branch of the Wolfsburg brand allegedly mistakenly published a month in advance – the correct date was April 29 – where it announced the creation of Voltswagen of America for the German brand’s electric range. According to a strong internal contacted by the CNBC, the name change is real. The statement said the name change should go into effect in May and called the change a “public statement of the company’s future investment in electric mobility.” Voltswagen will be placed as an external badge on all electric vehicle models, while termini models will continue to use the Volkswagen name. The VW press release was incomplete, citing the need for an additional citation and photographs from the automaker’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This amount of detail dispels the hypothesis of a classic “April Fool” accidentally published before April 1st.
Volkswagen, one million electric cars in 2021
Regardless of the confirmation of the Voltswagen name, Volkwagen is poised to become the first leading manufacturer in electric mobility by 2025 and sell one million electric by 2021. How will it do that? With multi-billion dollar investments of 46 billion euros on electrification and hybridization over the next five years, 35 billion of which only on electric models. To succeed, the German group will adopt a new platform strategy that will be based on four elements such as hardware, software, mobility services and batteries and charging. This will translate into greater economies of scale and exponential growth in battery technology and manufacturing.
Thanks to the battery strategy “Unified cell concept“, Solid state batteries will be a reality from 2023 and will be present on all brands up to 80% of all electric vehicles of the Group by 2030. This solution will, according to the German group, lead to a reduction in the cost of batteries in the 50% and therefore also of the cost of electric cars. Fast charging will be one of the strengths of the expansion of the electric car. To ensure that the demand for battery cells can be met, Volkswagen and its partners plan to build six cell factories with a total capacity of 240 gigawatt hours in Europe by the end of the decade. In addition, VW announced that the uptake of ultra-fast top-ups (hpc) will be increased “by 5 times in Europe” to support the demand for electric vehicles. Also in China, Volkswagen plans to create “a large high-power charging network”. With this in mind, collaborations have been agreed in Europe with the energy companies BP (Great Britain), Iberdrola (Spain) and Enel (Italy). With these partners, VW aims to activate 18 thousand public fast charging points in Europe by 2025 at a cost of around 400 million euros. The role of the platforms will be fundamental in obtaining the announced results. The Modular Electric Drive Toolkit (Meb) platform will be used for production in Europe, China and the United States and by 2022 will bring 22 fully electric models to life. To this will be added the Premium Platform Electric (PPE), with higher autonomy and shorter charging times. By the middle of the decade, the group intends to develop the Scalable Systems Platform (SSP), the further evolution of the platform for fully electric, digital as well as modifiable vehicles, on which to design and build models of all brands and in all segments. . As for connectivity and on-board software, all this will be based on the Vw.Os operating system provided by Car.Software-Org. The fourth element of the new platform strategy includes mobility services and other services. These include, among others, the MOIA ride pooling service, the WeShare car sharing offer and Volkswagen Bank’s flexible subscription services.
Loading…