AUTO SUPPLIER07.09.2017 10:10 Batteries for electric cars: do it yourself?
Batteries are the key element in the hoped for boom of electric cars. For masons, this is a question of the center: build or order in Asia?"Nonsense," says VW boss Müller. Obviously it is not the last word.
Just a year ago, Matthias Müller, Volkswagen's CEO, simply wiped this idea off the table. At a time when he was talking to journalists, he was asked whether Volkswagen would in the future produce battery cells for the propulsion of electric vehicles or from suppliers. So, after all, one of the key elements for tomorrow's cars.
Matthias Müller: "We can not make such a nonsense"
Müller's answer: "We can not make such a nonsense." The highly automated production only produced a few jobs and was a "pig tax", so the company chef at that time.
But the last word was probably not yet. The car industry is still struggling with the question of which risks are greater when it comes to setting up production for the planned rapid expansion of electric mobility: billion investments in cell factories to control the technology itself - or the growing dependency on cell producers from Japan, Korea and Japan China, which in turn could produce a growing part of the electric drive.
Economists are already painting the devil on the wall
Scientists like the battery researcher Martin Winter from the University of Münster warn of the consequences of great dependency. The cells, which are bundled into the battery during the current lithium-ion technology, are an important element in the value chain of an electric car. According to experts, the battery of an electric car accounts for between 30 and 40 percent of the value added and up to 80 percent of the battery.
By own cell manufacturing, a carer could increase his share of the value added by about 10 percentage points to 25 to 30 percent, explains Wolfgang Bernhart of the company consulting Roland Berger. This would be roughly the same as today in passenger cars with internal combustion engines.
That is why battery manufacturers are calling for winter without their own cell undermining their own market position, as the suppliers are always working on cars: "Many of the cell manufacturers already make complete drives so that the car manufacturers could come into the situation in the future a chassis to build this, "says Winter.
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