Most of the Volkswagen Group’s electric vehicles will share a single platform, the company has confirmed.
During the automaker’s annual media conference, VW boss Herbert Diess revealed that the company’s forthcoming Scalable Systems Platform (SSP) will eventually replace its existing MEB and PPE architectures, starting with Project Artemis from Audi with an expected launch in 2024 or 2025.
This new platform is being developed through Volkswagen’s Project Trinity that will spawn an electric sedan in 2026. Speaking with Autocar, Diess added that platform sharing will enable greater economies of scale. The SSP architecture is expected to be based on the technology of the MEB and PPE platforms.
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“The SSP platform will replace the existing platforms over a long period of time,” Diess said. “The start-up will begin with Artemis in 2024/2025. We’re taking what we’ve got with the MEB, and we’ll have cost improvement and standardization of the battery, which goes hand-in-hand with a new electronic architecture providing more computing power to the vehicles. The SSP will eventually be the single backbone for the Group, we’re talking beyond 2035 here.”
Diess said the skateboard design of new electric vehicle platforms provides “major scalability”, adding that the current “differentiation of platforms due to many different drivetrain concepts is no longer relevant.”
“Volkswagen’s platforms are an important building block of the Volkswagen success story, and we are taking the platform approach to a new level. By providing strong unified platforms our brands can unleash their full potential and synergies. Our MEB platform serves as a proof of concept. It has taken mobility into our core business.”
No less than 27 models from the VW Group will use the MEB platform by the end of next year, while the latest model based on the Audi/Porsche developed PPE platform will be the all-electric Macan.
