Under 25,000 euros from 2025
VW promises cheap e-cars and gets into wheel leasing
9/4/2023 11:22 am
When converting to the mobility provider of the future, Volkswagen wants to offer “affordable” electric cars in two years. And the financial subsidiary of Wolfsburg takes a stake in a Dutch company that leases bikes. The goal: to become the second most successful bicycle financier in Europe.
The Volkswagen Group wants to launch cheaper electric cars at entry-level prices of less than 25,000 euros in two years. From 2025, the further developed MEB+ platform will offer ten percent more range and efficiency. Models from Volkswagen, Skoda and Cupra should be able to charge their batteries in less than 20 minutes, as VW announced.
“We are making good progress. And faster than planned,” said VW boss Oliver Blume with a view to the switch to electric cars and mobility services. An essential prerequisite for the “democratization of e-mobility” is falling costs for batteries. A decisive lever for this is the unit cell of the VW subsidiary PowerCo as well as innovations such as inexpensive cell chemistry without cobalt and nickel. “This will make e-mobility affordable and even more sustainable for broader sections of the population,” promised VW.
The switch to electric vehicles in Germany has recently slowed down somewhat, as there are currently hardly any cars with electric motors that a large number of customers can afford. The Wolfsburg-based group also wants to reduce costs through large quantities through partnerships with other car manufacturers. In addition to Ford, the Indian manufacturer Mahindra also wants to use the electric drive and unit cell of the MEB volume electric platform. Discussions on this are well advanced.
It will still be a while before e-cars are just as profitable as comparable combustion models. In the medium term, this will be achieved for most e-models with the new SSP platform, on which more than 40 million vehicles are to be built across all brands and segments.
In the transformation to a provider of sustainable mobility, VW also wants to enter the business with leasing bicycles. The financial subsidiary Volkswagen Financial Services is planning a stake in the Dutch provider Bike Mobility Services (BMS), with whose parent company Pon the Wolfsburg-based company is already working together on the car rental company Europcar, VW announced at the IAA Mobility.
BMS is represented in bike leasing with brands such as Business Bike, Lease A Bike and B2Bike. “We are systematically driving the transformation forward and consistently opening up other attractive sources of income in the area of sustainable mobility,” said CEO Oliver Blume. The group expects a new, lucrative business area in Europe and the USA from the participation in BMS. The aim is to become number two among bicycle financiers in Europe.