Sand from the Sahara covered the Jarama racing circuit in Madrid with a thin ocher film in mid-March 2022. But the flotilla of Nissan-branded cars are immaculate. The Japanese group’s teams in Europe bricked them up to receive journalists from all over the Old Continent for several days to get in touch with the manufacturer’s new electric offer.
There are more and more events of this type – presentations, revelations, proclamations – detailing all or part of the electrical strategy of companies in the sector. The week of March 21 to 27, no less than four communications fed the chronicle of this wave of electrification. And the effervescence is not new. “Since the start of 2021, it’s been going all over the place, with a rhythm of announcements that we had never known”, says Denis Schemoul, consultant, director of S&P Global Mobility (ex-IHS Markit).
This bubbling is stimulated in Europe by the launch of the Community strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which could lead to a ban on internal combustion engines in 2035 in the European Union (EU). But classic manufacturers are also spurred on by Tesla, the first true all-electric brand, both a stock market model and a feared competitor. The Californian firm has just inaugurated its first European factory on March 22 in the suburbs of Berlin.
The historical manufacturers, champions of the thermal engine, must therefore find the martingale to compete with Tesla and the myriad of new pure electric competitors (especially Chinese) which are arriving on the European market.
Make your own batteries
“All manufacturers invest in the assembly of battery cells through partnerships, explains Alexandre Marian, Managing Director France of the consulting firm AlixPartners. For example, Volkswagen with the Swedish Northvolt, Renault-Nissan with the Chinese Envision, Stellantis and Daimler with Total-Saft…”
A dozen “gigafactories”, on the model of Tesla, are planned on the Old Continent, including three in the North of France. On March 23, the construction of two new battery factories was simultaneously announced: one in Italy (Termoli) for Stellantis and Daimler, the other in Spain (Valencia) by the Volkswagen Group via its Seat brand. “We are making a historic effort: 7 billion euros of investment to make Spain our production center for compact electric vehicles”, explained Wayne Griffiths, the president of Seat.
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