The high prices of German electric cars are considered to be one reason for the hitherto rather sluggish sales success. VW now wants to take countermeasures and launch more affordable models from 2025.
The Volkswagen Group wants to launch cheaper electric cars at entry-level prices of less than 25,000 euros in two years. From 2025, the further developed MEB+ platform will offer ten percent more range and efficiency. Models from Volkswagen, Skoda and Cupra should be able to charge their batteries in less than 20 minutes, as VW announced today at the IAA motor show in Munich.
“We are making good progress. And faster than planned,” said VW boss Oliver Blume with a view to the switch to electric cars and mobility services.
“Democratization of e-mobility”
An essential prerequisite for the “democratization of e-mobility” is falling costs for batteries. A decisive lever for this is the unit cell of the VW subsidiary PowerCo as well as innovations such as inexpensive cell chemistry without cobalt and nickel. “This will make e-mobility affordable and even more sustainable for broader sections of the population,” promised VW.
The Wolfsburg-based group also wants to reduce costs through large quantities through partnerships with other car manufacturers. In addition to Ford, the Indian manufacturer Mahindra also wants to use the electric drive and unit cell of the MEB volume electric platform. Discussions on this are well advanced.
According to VW, it will be a while before e-cars are just as profitable as comparable combustion models. In the medium term, this will be achieved for most electric models with the new production platform SSP (Scalable Systems Platform), on which more than 40 million vehicles are to be built across all brands and segments. With SSP, VW will achieve almost universal margin parity or even higher margins for electric cars, said Blume. However, an exact date has not yet been given.
How profitable are electric cars?
Mercedes boss Ola Källenius has also commented on the subject of electric cars. He expects higher costs in the foreseeable future. These could not be passed on to customers one-to-one via the price, he said yesterday in the run-up to the IAA. “The intensity of competition will be there.” It is all the more important to work on all parts of the company, such as fixed costs or in sales. “You have to move all these things in order to be able to maintain the same profitability as an ambition on the other side of the transformation.”
BMW CEO Oliver Zipse, on the other hand, said that BMW already earns no less money with its electric cars than with its petrol and diesel cars. Production is more expensive, the costs are higher – but “the assumption that combustion engines are always more profitable than electric cars is completely wrong,” he said. “Today we earn money with every electric car, and that will be even more the case with the new class.”
Unlike VW, however, Mercedes and BMW are mainly manufacturers in the premium segment, so that the cheap competition from China, for example, is currently problematic for VW in particular.
Will the market share fall in 2024?
The switch to electric vehicles in Germany has recently slowed down somewhat, as there are currently hardly any cars with electric motors that a large number of customers can afford. And anyone who is currently considering buying an electric car should even be prepared for rising prices, according to a recent study by the CAR Institute in Duisburg.
According to industry experts, the market share of e-cars in new registrations in Germany is therefore likely to decline sharply in the coming year. Management consultancy Deloitte expects e-car sales in Germany to slump by a third in 2024. The reason is the end of the purchase premiums for commercial owners in September and the gradual expiry of the premiums for private buyers by the end of 2025.