Volkswagen Group to launch an EV a month from 2019

The Volkswagen Group has confirmed it will scatter at least 16 electric-car production plants around the world within four years.

Speaking at the Volkswagen Group’s annual media conference in Berlin overnight, CEO Matthias Müller said his company plans to build up to three million EVs a year by 2025.

He said VW has already chosen its battery cell suppliers and locked in technology contracts worth up to $US25 billion for Europe and China alone, with US deals set to follow.

The Volkswagen Group plans to have electric cars from all 12 of its automotive brands, plus its Volkswagen Commercial operation and its trucking companies, MAN and Scania.

From 2019, Müller insisted, the group that owns Porsche, Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, Seat, Skoda and Bugatti would launch a new electric car “virtually every month”.

He admitted the Volkswagen Group will roll out 80 new electric cars and SUVs by 2025, with a heavy focus on Volkswagen-, Porsche- and Audi-badged cars.

He also confirmed every single one of the Group’s 300 models would have an electric variant by 2030, though in many cases this would be just a plug-in hybrid.

"This is how we intend to offer the largest fleet of electric vehicles in the world, across all brands and regions, in just a few years," Müller said.

"Over the last few months, we have pulled out all the stops to implement ‘Roadmap E' (Volkswagen’s EV rollout plan) with the necessary speed and determination.”

When it launched Roadmap E in Europe in the third quarter of last year, the Volkswagen Group projected it would deliver 80 new EVs from two EV architectures.

Müller today admitted it had found space for another nine electrically powered cars, including three more pure battery-electric vehicles (BEVs).

The Group already has eight BEVs and plug-in hybrids (though, admittedly, they’re mostly plug-in hybrids).

In the longer term, the Group’s pure BEVs would all sit upon one of two purpose-designed architectures. There is the MEB (modular electric toolkit) and a sports/luxury architecture jointly developed by Porsche and Audi.

In the interim, the e-Golf sits on a converted version of Volkswagen’s standard-issue MQB architecture, while early Porsche BEVs will use its J1 architecture and the first Audi BEVs will sit on C-BEV underpinnings.

Audi’s e-tron SUV will lead the next-generation rollout by launching later this year as a production car – and is in a race with the Jaguar I-PACE to become the first European BEV in the SUV segment.

Volkswagen plans to launch the first full MEB car, the I.D. hatch, in 2020 as the leader for an entire I.D. BEV sub-brand.

The company showed four I.D. concept cars at the Geneva motor show (including the hatch, the new Vizzion, the Buzz and the Crozz), all of which are headed for production before 2022.

It already has three EV assembly operations and will add another nine within two years.

The Volkswagen Group plans to pay for all this EV extravagance by slashing costs in other areas of development. Its development spend dropped 3.9 per cent in 2017 -- down to €13.1 billion, or about 6.7 per cent of its sales turnover -- and it plans to lower that to six per cent by 2020.