Billion investment
September 30, 2020 at 12:05 PM
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The Volkswagen Group is rapidly rolling out an electric offensive through its various brands. With this, it hopes to quickly hook up in terms of electric driving, where other brands are already ahead. Ultimately, the tide must turn completely and the Germans want to become the market leader in this field.
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This ambition was expressed by CEO Herbert Diess during the annual top meeting of the group. The fact that the Volkswagen Group is serious is clear from the amount that is devoted to this goal. The aim is to invest € 33 billion in the development of electric mobility by 2024. It seems that the same year the goal was to be the market leader in electric driving. Currently, it still has to tolerate Tesla and Chinese brands such as BYD and BAIC are still (miles) ahead of Volkswagen in terms of EV sales. In Europe, especially Renault, Nissan, Hyundai and Kia are much more strongly represented in this.
A tricky point seems to be the software that comes with electric cars. Disturbing rumors about this regularly came out at Volkswagen and Diess himself recently indicated that Tesla is causing him headaches in this area. The large neural network of Tesla and the way in which over-the-air updates are rolled out, is still relatively unexplored territory for Volkswagen. As a technological leader, Audi has to provide completely new IT for the Volkswagen Group by means of the newly established ‘Car.Software.Org’. In this way they hope to catch up with the competition. In the coming years, VW will invest € 14 billion in the project that should lead to an entirely new VW.OS operating system. Of course, they also respond to autonomous driving. Project Artemis Audi will lead – expected in 2024 – to the first car with the new VW.OS.
Porsche
Although the various volume brands of the Volkswagen Group must of course provide the large numbers of EVs, according to Diess there is also a special role for Porsche. “The brand has by far taken on the most ambitious electrification strategy of all brands. Porsche expects more than half of all new Porsche to be electrified by 2025.” He also explains that this naturally concerns both full BEVs and plug-in hybrids.
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