Germany Lags Behind in Battery Race

German carmakers are increasingly going EV.  Volkswagen alone has plans for as many as 80 EV models across its brands by 2025.  Also by that year, annual production of EVs should hit 3 million vehicles.  But there is a small problem with these plans:  they might not be competitive enough.  Okay, it’s not a small problem; it is potentially a very big one, and it concerns all German carmakers with EV plans.  The root of the problem is in the batteries.

German carmakers have been buying batteries from China and South Korea so actively that German battery makers have scrapped plans for local battery factories, deepening an already heavy dependence on imported products.  Bosch, for instance, last year said it planned to splash US$23 billion (20 billion euro) on building battery production capacity of 200 GWh by 2030.  Just two months after this announcement in February this year, the car supplier major said it no longer would pursue these plans.

“For Bosch, it’s important to have a technical understanding of cells.  We don’t have to make them ourselves,” Electrek quoted Bosch executive Rolf Bulander as saying at the time.  Yet a lot of other people in the industry and the country’s Chancellor apparently beg to differ.

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