Volkswagen doubles its electricity consumption

Volkswagen, which had already pledged to spend billions and billions on the development of the electric car, said on Friday that he planned to spend billions and billions more.

Volkswagen Group said it would spend 73 billion euros (roughly $ 86 billion) – or half the money it spends on investments in Europe – over the next five years on electric powertrain technology, hybrid technology and ‘other digital technologies. This is an increase from the 60 billion euros that the Volkswagen group said it was spending last year or 10% in its five-year plan budget.

Which is a statement of intent and a mark of how Volkswagen thinks things will turn out over the next decade. The Volkswagen Group owns or holds significant stakes in Audi, Porsche, Scania, Skoda, SEAT, Bentley, Bugatti and Lamborghini, in addition to its eponymous brand.

The Volkswagen Group has said it will have 70 fully electric cars by 2030, and it also said it believes it has made 26 million fully electric cars by then as well, 19 million of which are on its platform. Mobile Electric Drive Toolkit, also known as MEB. This platform quickly becomes the most important in the history of Volkswagen.

From Volkswagen’s release:

“Having paved the way for a battery-electric future in the Volkswagen Group early on, we are now a world leader with our electric platforms and a wide range of electric vehicles,” said Herbert Diess, Group Managing Director. Volkswagen. “In the years to come, it will also be crucial to achieve a leadership position in automotive software in order to meet people’s needs for individual, sustainable and fully connected mobility in the future. To this end, we have doubled our digitization expenses. “

The software, indeed, seems to be a big part of it. And I’m a little surprised that Volkswagen thinks it can compete on that front – automakers are usually better off sticking to what they are very good at, which is making cars and outsourcing the rest – but it definitely looks like Volkswagen thinks it can compete on that front. In Volkswagen’s case, better software is also an integral part of its development of autonomous driving.

Here is a little more about Automotive News:

The goal is to create a proprietary software stack, which will be deployed in Audi’s Artemis project to develop an advanced and autonomous electric vehicle by 2024.

The company’s share of software will increase from 10% to 60%, VW said.

In addition, a large part of the funds allocated for digitization will be invested in the critical areas of artificial intelligence, autonomous driving and the digitization of important business processes, the automaker said.

Jefferies analyst Philippe Houchois said that while the overall capital budget had remained unchanged, VW’s priorities had seen a “significant reallocation to software and digitization and a continued focus on Germany”.

To put this in a little more context: the Volkswagen Group said end of October that it made a profit of 3.2 billion euros in the third quarter of this year, and expects to be profitable for the whole of 2020, the year of the pandemic. These are big bets on electric and autonomous technology, in other words, but Volkswagen is making them from an already strong position.