Volkswagen wants to establish itself as the world’s largest electric vehicle maker by 2025, overtaking Tesla in the process.
While recently presenting its strategy, the German car manufacturer said it expects battery-powered cars to account for half of its global sales by 2030. Before that happens, it is looking to overtake Tesla in EV sales by 2025, despite the fact that EVs only accounted for three percent of its global sales in 2020.
“We set ourselves a strategic target to become global market leader in electric vehicles – and we are well on track. Now we are setting parameters,” VW Group chief executive Herbert Diess said while announcing the company’s product plan for the coming decade, Reuters reports.
Looking further into the future, the Volkswagen Group aims for the majority of its vehicles to be zero-emissions in all major markets by 2040, while the company itself aims to be climate neutral by 2050.
Helping make this possible will be a move that will see every VW Group vehicle built on a single electric platform. It will also phase out internal combustion platforms in the coming decade and the company’s sole electric platform, dubbed the Scalable Systems Platform (SSP), should debut beneath the skin of the Audi A8’s successor set to launch in 2026.
The German group is also investing heavily in batteries and will introduce a unified battery cell design that will slash costs by 50 per cent from their current levels. This battery cell will be produced at six factories across Europe.
