Year 2025. This is the date that the Volkswagen Group has set itself to become the global leader in electric mobility. How will he do it? 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 “Unified cell concept” strategy, solid state accumulators 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. According to the German group, this solution will lead to a 50% reduction in battery costs and therefore also in 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. (hpc) will be increased “by 5 times in Europe” to support the demand for electric vehicles. Volkswagen also plans to create a mega high-power charging network in China. 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 to obtain 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 of all brands, including Audi, to life. To this will be added the Premium Platform Electric (Ppe), with longer range and shorter charging times and is reserved for high-end Audi and Porsche cars. 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.
Going into the specifics of the models coming soon. Volkswagen among the various innovations will present the Id.5 electric coupe suv, a second electric coupe suv with more compact dimensions, the restyling of the Polo and the debut of the series version of the new electric Bulli will not be missing. The VW brand in 2026 will launch a new self-driving electric sedan Level 4 Sae, the result of the Trinity project announced in recent days.
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Skoda will expand the range of electric models with the Enyaq iV also in the coupé version, while 2021 will see the debut of the new generation of the compact Fabia and the restyling of the Kodiaq. Seat has on its agenda the update of the Ibiza and the plug-in versions of the Tarraco, while the Cupra brand will present the electric Born and the Formentor e-Hybrid. The long list of new electric models and the targets set for 2025 will not translate into a goodbye to heat engines, however. The group led by Herbert Diess did not want to indicate a precise date for the end of internal combustion engines, due to regional differences in the use of primary energy and regulatory conditions. The fact remains that iconic models such as the Golf or the Passat will also continue to be developed in a thermal version in the coming years. Bentley will become fully electric, while Bugatti will not be transferred to the Croatian Rimac.
To this list are naturally added Audi and Porsche – we talk about them in the adjacent articles – both at the center of the growth and leadership strategy in the field of electric mobility. Sales of zero-emission models will be the first test for the VW group; While 231,600 battery-powered vehicles were delivered in 2020, more than triple compared to 2019, by 2021 the goal is to sell one million electric cars globally. It seems like an eternity has passed since the days of Dieselgate, when Wolfsburg was accused of being the “big polluter”, while today and in the next few years it will become the group to be chased for green mobility.