Volkswagen Thinks It Needs a Lot of Batteries This Decade… Will We Buy the Electric Cars?
You’re gonna need a bigger battery factory. OK, it’s a Jaws reference, but it seemed right.
Volkswagen executives think they will need about 300-gigawatt hours (GWh) worth of battery cells a year by the end of the decade for their ambitious rollout of electric vehicles in Europe.
The supply chain update is part of the world’s second-largest carmaker’s strategy to raise the share of fully electric vehicles in Europe to more than 70% by 2030 at its core brand, details of which were unveiled last week.
So far, Volkswagen, which sources batteries from LG Chem, Samsung SDI, SK Innovation and CATL, expects annual demand in Europe to be more than 150 GWh from 2025 and to be at a similar level in Asia.
It’s not clear how or where Volkswagen will get all these batteries if every other carmaker is doing the same thing, and it’s not clear that consumers want that many EVs in the first place.
