Volkswagen Accelerates Investment in Electric Cars as It Races to Overtake Tesla
13 Novembro 2020 - 01:30PM
Dow Jones News
By William Boston
Volkswagen AG plans to invest around $86 billion in the
development of electric vehicles and other new technologies over
the next five years, as the world's largest auto maker races to
overtake Tesla Inc. as the leading maker of electric cars.
With the shift to electric cars, connected vehicles and an
increasingly digital manufacturing process, the auto industry is
amid its biggest transformation in a century. Volkswagen said
Friday that it would allocate around half of a planned $177 billion
in R&D and capital expenditure to accelerate development of
technologies such as digital factories, automotive software and
self-driving cars.
The German company, which sold around 11 million vehicles in
2019, updates its five-year investment plans every November. This
year's revised plan underscores its efforts to build on its already
vast investment in electric vehicles and digital technology.
VW launched the ID.3 all-electric compact car this year, the
first model in a new generation of all-electric vehicles. The car
has received complaints about quality and software features,
prompting reviewers to score it below Tesla's equivalent model.
However, the car has sold well, pushing VW past Tesla in September
as the biggest electric-vehicle maker in Europe by sales.
VW Chief Executive Herbert Diess has often complained about the
company's failure to catch up with Tesla quickly, especially in
terms of software, which has been a weak spot.
"In the next few years it will be important to also take a
leading position in vehicle software," Mr. Diess said Friday. "Only
as a digital mobility company can we satisfy people's needs for
individual, sustainable and fully networked mobility in the
future."
Volkswagen has earmarked about EUR150 billion in capital
expenditure for 2021 through 2025, of which EUR73 billion will be
invested in "future technologies," an increase from EUR60 billion
in the previous five-year planning round.
The biggest change is the acceleration of software development,
which includes everything from fixing the problems with the
ID-series to moving faster to develop self-driving vehicles and
connecting the company's more-than 120 factories to the cloud.
The company said it would double its investment in digitization
to EUR27 billion over the next five years. It is also increasing
its investment in electric vehicle development to EUR35 billion,
from EUR33 billion in the previous round. Another EUR11 billion
will be spent creating hybrid electric versions of all of its main
models.
Volkswagen is one of the industry's biggest research and
development spenders. Its five-year plan doesn't include additional
investment in China. Because Volkswagen doesn't consolidate its
joint ventures in China, the investment there is financed out of
the local business, which sold four million largely locally
produced vehicles last year.
The annual planning rounds are highly political affairs. This
year, fraught with upheaval in global markets, VW has committed
money to developing new vehicles in Germany, in a nod to the state
of Lower Saxony, which holds a blocking minority stake in the
company, and the IG Metall trade union, which controls half of the
seats on VW's supervisory board.
The company unveiled plans to build a new sport-utility vehicle
at its main German plant in Wolfsburg, with production slated to
begin in 2024. In Hanover, where the company's light utility
vehicle manufacturing is based, it will add three fully electric
SUVs.
Write to William Boston at william.boston@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 13, 2020 11:15 ET (16:15 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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