With a world premiere of a new modular electric drive matrix, Volkswagen Launches ELECTRIC FOR ALL Campaign.
As part of the ELECTRIC FOR ALL campaign launched today, the brand will be putting attractive models at affordable prices on the road, paving the way for the breakthrough of electric vehicles. The electric offensive is based on the modular electric drive matrix (MEB), a technology platform developed specifically for electric vehicles.
The MEB is the key to the “electric car for all”: it enables a hitherto unachievable price-service ratio and will be instrumental in transforming the electric vehicle from a niche product into a bestseller. Brand Board Member for E-Mobility Thomas Ulbrich commented: “We will make electric vehicles popular and get as many people as possible excited about electric cars. The MEB is one of the most important projects in the history of Volkswagen – a technological milestone, similar to the transition from the Beetle to the Golf.”
Furthermore, the MEB bundles Volkswagen’s entire production knowledge: it is not a platform for vehicles with combustion engines that has been retroactively modified, but has from the outset been designed to be 100 percent, uncompromisingly electric. As Ulbrich put it: “Our Modular Transverse Toolkit already proved Volkswagen is one of the most successful platform developers in the auto industry. Now, we’re transferring this know-how and this strategy to the electric age. By the end of 2022, four Group brands will be ramping up 27 MEB models worldwide, ranging from compact cars to the lifestyle Bulli. That is something quite unique.”
All members of the ID. family are designed for fast charging. Using fast charging systems, the battery can be charged 80 percent in about 30 minutes thanks to a completely new, significantly more powerful battery system developed by Volkswagen Group Components. Senger explained: “The use of a new generation of high-performance batteries begins with the ID. models. Thanks to their modular design and the multi-cell format, these batteries can be installed in smaller or larger ID. models.”
Key Points
- Electric vehicles at affordable prices with fast charging.
- World premiere of the Modular Electric Drive (MEB) matrix is the key to the “electric car for all”
- Board Member Thomas Ulbrich commented:“The MEB is one of the most important projects in the history of Volkswagen – a technological milestone, similar to the transition from the Beetle to the Golf”
- Volkswagen plans to sell some 150,000 electric cars, including 100,000 ID. models made in Germany, by 2020
- 10 million electric vehicles across the Group based on the MEB
Transition Time
A quick check shows the transition will not be immediate. According to CarSalesBase Volkswagen European sales peaked in 2015 at just over 1.7 million cars.
Volkswagen Car Sales by Region
Globally, Volkswagen is huge in China. 150,000 cars is but a tiny fraction of sales. But the announcement was just made. We are headed into 2019.
To go from 0 to 150,000 in just over a year is quite impressive.
Tesla Production Comparison
Tesla’s goal is 6,000 model 3 cars a month, 72,000 a year.
It struggles to hit 4,000 a month, and quality control is poor.
Tesla Battery Comparison
According to Quora, Tesla Supercharging stations charge with up to 145 kW of power distributed between two adjacent cars, with a maximum of 120 kW per car. That is up to 16 times as fast as public charging stations; they take about 20 minutes to charge to 50%, 40 minutes to charge to 80%, and 75 minutes to 100%.
Assuming Volkswagen can meet its stated goal, a Tesla takes 40 minutes at a “supercharging station”. Volkswagen anticipates an 80% charge in a half hour.
Competition
Tesla is about to have serious competition from Volkswagen. GM and Ford cannot be that far behind now.
Whatever lead Tesla appeared to have in batteries has now vanished.
In the US, adoption to electric will take a while, perhaps a decade. In Europe and China, the roll-out will be much faster.
The end is now in sight for gas-powered vehicles in much of the world.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
with regards to the safety argument, gasoline tanks are also flammable, but hardly ever explode
the ev technology works great for me, you charge at night at home, so no need to go to the gas station, once in a while I’ll do public charging, but not that often
Let’s revisit the return on this “investment in the future” when ZIRP is over.
As my late father observed — Listen carefully to what people say; listen even more carefully to what they do not say.
VW makes no mention of the range of their yet-to-be-built electric vehicle — and we can all guess why. If the driver has to recharge 3 times as often as with gasoline, and each recharge takes about 8 times longer than gasoline, the electric vehicle is going to be a tough sell outside niche markets. Which is exactly what we see today.
Besides, we know that German automobile manufacturers lie. Fool me once …
Someone extrapolated that this Audi will be ~210-220 miles EPA.
Probably at 70mph+ highway speed will be just below 200 miles.
These number confirm that Tesla drive train is 20-30% more efficient that EQC or Etron.
Are you willing to wait 30 minutes at a charge station to get ‘80%’ new possible mileage. Gasoline station takes less than 5 minutes.
I don’t know enough about the technologies to know what or who will succeed, but I would guess German Engineers will succeed over a drug addled adolescent CEO.
“Tesla’s goal is 6,000 model 3 cars a month, 72,000 a year.
It struggles to hit 4,000 a month, and quality control is poor.”
Um, Tesla certainly has it’s issues but the above is way off as the goal is per WEEK, not month. The goal for Q3 alone is 50-55,000 and they should make that.
Counterpoint: Musk called all Volkswagen owners pedophiles.
Mish, on another point, Tesla shorts love to repeat ad infinitum that Tesla has bond debt coming due in Q1 2019, which they never mention amounts to less than 3% of its current market cap.
Can you comment on Volkswagen’s debt as well?
My cut and paste from WSJ:
Volkswagen at group level had €18.03 billion in cash at the end of 2017, but the company also faces high spending requirements. The diesel scandal cost over €19.1 billion as of Dec. 31, 2017. The company also pledged to spend €34 billion by 2022 on a wide-ranging mobility and digitization effort. Volkswagen had total borrowings of €163.47 billion, versus earnings of €11.63 billion as of Dec. 31, 2017.
Volkswagen is also established and isn’t being run by an egomaniac micromanager. If you haven’t noticed, Tesla’s market cap has dropped 30% in the past month with no bottom in sight.
Tesla loses money every quarter. How does it service $10 billion coming due? Market cap cannot service debt. If Musk issues shares to do so, the stock will be hammered hard. And the company still won’t make a profit
Tesla is scaling (which shorts ignore) and producing more cars from their investments, and is on track to be profitable this quarter (as they were briefly profitable once before another round of investments), and get more profitable with time. They don’t loose money on each car sold, they loose money short term on expansion expenses. Look at Nio’s expenses in trying to get started in this industry. I won’t be surprised if Tesla needs another raise to see through that period. Tesla’s stock has corrected beyond the problem already due to unprecedented short FUD over the issue. You ignore VWs problem of >167 billion due and having to finance a makeover to EVs. How many years to pay that off with earnings of 12 billion per year soon to be dropping over their needed expenses to make that change?
And even shortie strategy realizes market cap is vital for servicing debt so that is a just plain incorrect statement.
How are those massive batteries recycled? Oh yeah… they’re not. 100% toxic, 0% recycleable.
Necessity is the mother of invention. It will come.
watch value of used diesel VW’s skyrocket… why? DEMAND.
the automaker that re-introduces efficient, renewable diesels to the US will make a mint. Book it.
All of this electric car BS is just virtue-signalling.
So unlike lithium batteries, diesel fuel is recyclable? How much to extract it back out of our air?
And when solid state batteries come what will you say then. That’s no a matter of if but when. Not only will electric vehicles take over but so will solar houses. My neighbor threw up solar panels and last month for the same size house as mine he paid 20$ for a connection fee and 65$ for his monthly payment. I paid 295$ in electric bills. You can bet you’re ass I’m going solar. And if I can add a battery pack I’ll be basically off the grid. THAT is innovation. I live in Colorado. Most of the southwest will go this way. Bank it.
Simply amazing logical disconnect between Mish’s knee jerk negativity on Tesla vehicles and his radiant optimism about other manufacturer’s future “projections” of similar EVs that are behind Tesla’s infrastructure with already 300,000 sold vehicles. All pretend validated with misleading data. Mish, explain your angle here? Why do you push this so hard? Help us understand this phenomena. What income, both directly and indirectly, do you receive from your negative cut’n’paste Tesla articles? You still have not answered my question about the relevancy of your put position. Please inform your readers what percentage of your portfolio is in TSLA puts to answer whether your position is serious or token.
Volkswagen is lagging behind Tesla’s infrastructure? Tesla is assembling cars in a fricken tent for crying out loud! All of the established auto manufacturers will blow Tesla away when they enter the EV market. They’ve already mastered assembly lines, distribution, dealer networks and service centers. All areas Musk isn’t even close to figuring out.
I have a small PUT position. The Septembers will likely be worthless. I am ahead on the rest. I would comment on Tesla whether or not I had puts. I have been commenting on self-driving and electric cars for years. I have been optimistic on electric for a long time, self-driving as well. Any disconnect is in your head as a Tesla fan.
It is a farce to suggest I receive income from articles on Tesla. I turn down the opportunity for paid articles all the time. I post what I want.
I would be highly surprised you do not make money even indirectly (as I queried) from traffic to Tesla articles that draw more hits on the advertisements present on your website? I have never in my lifetime seen such a dominant trend in FUD articles in the media anything like what is going on with Tesla. It will be remembered as a case study on the impact of social media extremes. I tend to think they are profitable rather than being done out of impartial journalism. I am pretty sure it is well related to the big money shorts but am curious about its various mechanisms.
In financialized dystopias, a company that is “announcing a campaign,” or “making a promise” of the future, rather than boringly building and profitably selling an product; is not in the business of selling vehicles to drivers, but rather to sell stocks and bonds to “investors.” Who, in financialized dystopias, are the only ones with any money.
The end is now in sight for gas-powered vehicles? Bahahahahah. Yeah, like 2059 in sight I guess. Same with self-driving cars. Mish has been hyping them like crazy, but we’re not even close to seeing them on the road in any type of real quantity. We are at least 25 years away.
people are already using self driving cars as a taxi service in Phoenix. once 5G comes the adoption of those cars will accelerate.
If so, they’re not using Uber…
“Volkswagen Announces “Electric for All” Campaign”
Supposedly, lithium is not recyclable, as Karl Denninger mentioned the other week. What are the environmental issues surrounding the production of millions of lithium car batteries, which will have a limited life span? Another issue is the production of all the electricity needed. California wants to eliminate all new internal combustion engines and all non renewable sources of electricity by a certain date. Sounds good on paper, but reality hasn’t worked out well so far.
> Volkswagen plans to sell some 150,000 electric cars, including 100,000 ID. models made in Germany, by 2020
Only naive investors who have not been following EVs news for the last several years believe that.
VW, BMW, Mercedes Benz, Audi, GM, Ford should have less credibility w.r.t their EV production promises than Tesla. Admittedly, Tesla has slipped behind ~ year on their aspirational Model 3 production goal. However, these other manufacturers have been aspirationally promising “EVs in 2 years for the last several years” and done ALMOST NOTHING. Just few example:
https://insideevs.com/oft-delayed-audi-a3-e-tron-pushed-back/
Perhaps this has something to do more with investor psychology that VW & others have anonymous PR departments and general public don’t hold them accountable for missing their EV promises; contrary to Tesla where a concrete person (Elon Musk) is doing the PR job and everyone remembers a concrete person making a concrete promise.
Attached is an amazing video of automated production of electric motors for Audi vehicles. Very quiet and not much intervention by humans in the production process. I would assume that this is the wave of the future……electric vehicles and robotic manufacturing. The video is only 6 weeks old.
I just dropped $20 of good old fashioned gasoline into my 2007 Honda Fit, and noticed I missed the big moment- the odometer read 200,009. That’s the kind of value I’m looking for in electrics, and I don’t see any kind of proven track record being available for many years to come. We need oil to spike up to $150 again for people to take it seriously, and in that case the economy crumbles and no one is buying cars anyway.
…Which is why Honda, Toyota et al have been “dragging their feet” (according to the starry eyed) wrt BEVs.. As opposed to Sci-Fi true-believers, they’ve bothered doing the math with current, and even very optimistic future, estimates forwhat can be done.
In theory, you add a charger to your house. The price is about $5000 plus. This will be considered the largest load for a house, which is is. As this will be daily use, the grid just won’t be able to handle it without massive additional infrastructure.
Don’t need 30 minute charging in your house though, overnight will do…
OR, your supercharger can communicate with your neighbors’, so that you don’t all charge during the same 30 minute time slot…
This is without a 30 minute charging time. I work in construction in California, and I tell you there isn’t the capacity, period.
I wish I was smarter. I would like to know with today’s technology, if relying on fossil fuels for most of our power generation, how much oil & coal & natural gas would need to be burned to energize our electrical grid to power all of our cars if all switched from gasoline to electric. Would the energy consumption be the same? Not sure if you measure such things in BTUs, joules, watts, amps, etc. Would switching exclusively to electric vehicles overwhelm our power grid? Would overall pollutants discharged into the atmosphere be reduced? I would like to hear a reasonable reply to my questions. I honestly don’t have the answers.
The EPA uses a conversion of 33.7 kilowatts to 1 gallon of gasoline. Most electric vehicles go about 3x as far on 33.7kw as an equivalent gas powered car does on 1 gallon of gas. But, a fossil fuel powered plant is only about 33% efficient, meaning there will be no net savings at all if the electricity is generated by fossil fuels. To have any impact, the electricity will need to be generated by solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear.
New gas fired power plants can be much more efficient than 33%. Theoretically, almost twice that. And even in practice, over their life cycle, a good bit higher than 33%. Transmission losses (although fuel trucks aren’t free either), battery charging losses etc. does cut into that, but in all but extreme cases, you’ll still end up more efficient than with a local power plant in each vehicle.
“solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear”.
Yep, and all of those power sources are site-specific, inconsistent, expensive or dangerous…
Fossil fuels & vehicles running on fossil fuels will be here for a loooooooooong time, regardless of Mish’s misplaced enthusiasm.
The CA electric grid nearly collapsed from hot weather, and Gov. Moonbeam isn’t planning on increasing the GRID (infrastructure, much less powerplant) capacity. Now add millions of electric cars…
Oh, also 30 minutes is with something like a supercharger. The nearest supercharger to me is over 100 miles away. Or I could charge it overnight using my state’s hydro or clean coal (when it isn’t mining Cryptocurrency). But I can’t go that far.
There were electric cars in the 1920’s. There is one in an auto museum in Montana. It could only go 20MPH.
The engineering problem is the “specific impulse” – BTUs or Joules per kilogram or cubic meter. Batteries are bad, rechargables are worse, Lithium can’t be (economically yet) recycled and has a large energy footprint to mine and there isn’t enough of it.
Have you already forgotten https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event that was nixed
I can’t transition from a dead battery to a charged one.
I wasn’t dazzled by Tesla, but neither by the underlying super-tech-hype.
It took a while to replace livery stables with gas stations.
My big problem is I don’t see gas stations being replaced with battery exchange sites, much less superchargers.
The US will definitely be behind the curve on electric. Europe and Asia first.
There is no curve. Pure BEVs are a credit driven mirage. The people who buy them, are largely clueless recipients of Fed welfare. The governments who champion them and sponsor their buyers, are similarly insulated from reality by mountains of unearned freshprint. While half the bill is paid for by even more clueless “investors,” aka the idiots who think the Fed created more wealth when it printed up more money with which to pump up the “value” of their idle, decaying “assets.” The whole BEV racket, is nothing but cluelessness to the third power or more.
If BEVs were a viable technology, or even a likely viable one in the near to mid future, those who are the most efficient at producing cars, are most attuned to car markets world wide, and have experience designing, building and selling cars as part of a cash flow positive business, would have picked up on it long ago. Rather than leave it to the never-met-a-Brooklyn-Bridge-that-wasn’t-a-good-“investment” charlatans and tax flush government hacks who are currently holding court in that pen.
Electrification of niche segments of the transportation landscape will certainly happen. Battery powered tools have moved up the energy-requirement chain, from cordless screw drivers to some slightly more energy intensive uses, as time has gone by. Heck, I have a hybrid snowblower…. Fat chance that thing will be able to function without the ICE anytime soon, though.. Hybrid cars are another means of using batteries where they make sense. Possibly, in the future, with enough electric range to allow the Germans to halfway ban diesel in cities, without completely killing off all longer distance travel in the process.
But some pure-BEV utopia, won’t exist outside the overoptimistic minds of those who never figured out what the Fi part of Sci-Fi means, and the legions of clueless Fed welfare recipients that keep them flush in their unrealistic silliness, for a long, long time.
FedGov will have to subsidize the living hell out of EVs if there is to be ANY curve at all. So much for reason & mathematics… it’s all virtue-signalling now.