Without controlling the supply of batteries, the electrical future planned by many car companies will not materialize. The pioneer in the whole area, Tesla, understood this, and he will be followed by the German Volkswagen. With regard to European policy, Green Deal will have to account for 60 percent of its electric vehicle sales by 2030. This will require new battery technologies and other in-house factories.
To secure enough batteries, Volkswagen will need a total of six battery cells with a total capacity of 240 GWh per year, so each will have a capacity of 40 GWh. Some of them, like the first in Skellefteå, Sweden since 2023, want to run with partners (in this case Northvolt), some of them will be built on their own.
In 2025, VW would like to open its own plant in Salzgitter, Germany, which it originally built with Northvolt, but will eventually take it over itself. Furthermore, one factory is to be built in Western Europe, one in Eastern Europe and another two, the location of which the group’s representatives do not want to give any indication yet.
The West German plant is to be in operation from 2026 and could be established in Spain, Portugal or France, with the East European plant apparently in the Czechia as well. “We don’t know where it will be yet: in the Czech Republic, Poland or Slovakia. It depends on how the negotiations with the local governments turn out,” said Thomas Schmall, who is responsible for technology on the VW Group and also leads Volkswagen Group Components. which the races fall.
The production of battery cells in-house is part of a change in Volkswagen’s approach. Like most big players in the market, he bought batteries from other companies (in Europe, for example, from the Korean LG Chem). However, VW wants to combine external suppliers with its own resources. The reason is to gain more control over the supply chain, to secure enough links at a good price. A similar step was recently announced by the American Tesla, for which the articles were previously produced by the Japanese Panasonic and the Chinese CATL.
Volkswagen also wants to move to a specific unified link in production, around which the cars themselves will be designed. The cell may vary in its chemical composition depending on the type of car, but it should be largely uniform so that the company can more easily reach the high volumes that are key to reducing the price of batteries. In 2030, 80 percent of corporate cars should use this special article, the remaining 20 percent will go to specific solutions for cars in which it will not be used.
In 2024, Audi should be the first to use a new type of cell in the first of the production cars that are being developed as part of the Artemis project. In this case, too, Audi will use a new battery design for the first time, in which the cells will not be grouped into modules (cell-to-module), but will be mounted directly into the main battery cover (cell-to-pack). In the future, VW could also mount the cells directly on the car’s structure and become an integral part of it (cell-to-car).
American Tesla is planning something similar in the near future. The batteries should be incorporated directly into the construction of cars (Model Y) manufactured at the German factory in Grünheide near Berlin. According to VW, a similarly simplified battery can save approximately five percent of its price.
Another 15 percent can be found in the design of the article, 10 in the production process (VW plans, like Tesla, to invest in materials from recycled batteries, of which it can reuse up to 95 percent) and 20 percent in cathode and anode materials, which significantly contribute to the price of the battery, but also to its properties, such as charging speed, range, etc.
Volkswagen is looking to work with several different cathode compositions. He currently uses cells with a cathode made of nickel, manganese and cobalt (NMC), which, according to Frank Blome, who is in charge of battery cells in the concern, is today’s standard.
In the future, however, the company would use more affordable lithium iron phosphate cells in its cheaper electric vehicles, talking about an electrical alternative to the Fabia. These have a lower price due to the absence of nickel and cobalt, but the tax for this is also lower energy density, and therefore shorter range. It is these cells that VW should be able to produce up to 50 percent cheaper than current types.
For larger cars, the “chemistry” of cathodes with a high manganese content should come in the future. It contains less nickel, no cobalt, so it is cheaper and has a higher density than NMC cells.
VW is also working to replace the artificial carbon in the anode with silicon. This should have a positive effect on the charging speed. Already today, the batteries modified in this way are used by the cars with the fastest charging on the market: the Porsche Taycan and the Audi e-tron GT.
Volkswagen has confirmed that it is also working on so-called solid state batteries with a solid electrolyte. According to Blome, these could halve charging times.
Volkswagen’s future strategy is also to address the shortcomings in the infrastructure of charging stations, which, according to Thomas Schmall, is one of the three main reasons why customers do not want to buy an electric car. As a result, the company will build its own network of charging stations in China and the USA.
In Europe, further expansion of the Ionity network is planned, and in a number of countries, VW wants to build additional chargers in cooperation with selected partners. In Italy, it is to be the power company Enel, in Spain it is Iberdrol, and in Britain, Germany and other large European countries it is the petroleum group BP.
In this way, VW wants to fivefold the number of high-performance stations in Europe to 18,000 by 2025. According to Thomas Schmall, this represents a third of the minimum required in the longer term. You should pay for them using plug-and-charge technology, so you only need to connect the charging cable to the car for authorization.
Volkswagen also anticipates that its cars will support the two-way charging function for the foreseeable future, and will therefore be able to serve as a kind of mobile power bank to store excess energy from renewable sources and balance the grid. According to producer statistics, in Germany, due to the uneven nature of renewables, 6.5 GWh of electricity is wasted per year. Which means enough energy for one year for 2.7 million electric cars.
Electric cars or discarded batteries from them can then serve as a balancing power bank from the level of a family house through an apartment complex to the entire state. “We are convinced that with the right energy management and intelligent energy storage, people will be able to recharge their electric cars for free in the future,” says Herbert Diess, head of the group.
– .
