Volkswagen's electric attack

Volkswagen will try to overcome almost a year of Dieselgate negativity by swamping the world with zero-emission cars.

Volkswagen Group CEO Matthias Mueller has announced the company will sell up to three million electric cars a year by 2025 after transforming its entire car-making and components operations.

“We expect that by 2025 we will be selling about two to three million pure-electric automobiles a year,” he told a press briefing in Wolfsburg yesterday.

That would realistically mean that a quarter of Volkswagen’s annual production would be dedicated to electric cars, plus another low-emission fleet of plug-in hybrid models.

To reach those targets, the VW Group will release more than 30 new electric models over the next 10 years, with an expected early surge in electric models to meet the European Union’s tough new emissions laws, due in 2020-21.

He also said the company expected to have fully autonomous cars on sale “in all relevant categories” at the start of the next decade, which indicates around 2020.

In a broad sweeping strategy, the company will also realign its entire business line-up, rolling its component production businesses into a single unit. The Volkswagen Group component business currently employs 67,000 people across 26 plants around the world.

Hit hard by falling confidence in its diesel passenger cars, Mueller admitted the brand was ramping up its in-house electric-powertrain and autonomous-driving development to regain consumer trust.

“We will develop the necessary expertise and are planning to hire around 1000 additional software specialists, among other measures,” the CEO, a computer sciences graduate, insisted.

While Volkswagen’s return on investment has traditionally lagged as a brand at around two per cent, its group profits last year only rose to six per cent, with Mueller insisting that will rise to between seven and eight per cent this year.

He said he would reveal the new strategies for all 12 of the Volkswagen Group’s brands by the end of the year.

That’s despite the Dieselgate emissions-rigging scandal costing it €16.2 billion so far, with the figure for the legal costs in the US yet to be determined.

Mueller said that recovering the brand’s industry leadership would “require us, following the serious setback as a result of the diesel issue, to learn from mistakes made.”