Herbert Diess, the boss of Volkswagen, spoke about the Apple Car and the competition with Tesla in several interviews. The German thinks Volkswagen will overtake Tesla in terms of sales by 2025 and does not imagine Apple succeeding in producing its own car. He believes more in CarPlay.
Volkswagen, one of the biggest car sellers in the world, which ranks first in Europe in terms of volume, is struggling a bit against new manufacturers like Tesla. Indeed, the Volkswagen ID.3, which is the answer to Tesla’s Model 3, did not overshadow the American manufacturer. So much so that in 2021, the Model 3 and the Model Y are the two best-selling electric cars in the world. Thus, Volkswagen sold around 75,000 ID.3s in 2021 compared to more than 500,000 Model 3s over the same period for Tesla. But Herbert Diess thinks Volkswagen will overtake Tesla by 2025.
In an interview given to CNBC, the boss of the German group acknowledged Tesla’s considerable lead in the electric car market. He attributes the lead to the fact that Tesla is primarily a new-tech company that produces cars. It is indeed partly for this reason that Elon Musk’s company is ahead in many areas, such as the software part, but also everything related to the optimization of batteries and motors to make them very efficient cars.
Overtaking Tesla by 2025
The war is not lost, however, for Herbert Diess who sees the possibility for Volkswagen to sell more electric cars than Tesla from 2025. It is not impossible since Volkswagen has a solid supply chain with many factories and partners in worldwide. But this one has a very marked inertia, and the switch to electric therefore takes time for Volkswagen (as with all traditional manufacturers) who still have to deal with producing and selling thermal cars during this transition. This thus strongly slows down Volkswagen on the road to electrification.
For its part, Tesla must achieve the necessary ramp-up of its production chain to succeed in producing many more cars per year. Volkswagen has indeed sold more than 8 million worldwide in 2021 against just under a million for Tesla.
Volkswagen is not afraid of the Apple Car
The other competitor of Volkswagen also comes from California and it is Apple. The Apple brand is, according to persistent rumors, developing the Apple Car, an electric car that gives pride of place to new technologies. On the subject, Herbert Diess does not see Apple succeeding in producing its own car. According to the man, it would represent a “too big effort” for the American brand which develops totally different products (we think of smartphones and computers) without producing them.
Instead, the Volkswagen boss thinks Apple will integrate cars through its CarPlay system. Herbert Diess thus imagines Apple selling only software solutions to car manufacturers. This is indeed already somewhat the case with CarPlay, but it is true that the future CarPlay, unveiled at WWDC, could well change the phase of the automotive industry on the software side. Apart from Tesla, for the moment, no manufacturer offers a quality on-board system capable of being fully updated remotely.
Between Tesla, which designed its own OS, and Google, which is putting Android Automotive everywhere, Apple was doing the minimum in the automotive sector. CarPlay was just a copy of the iPhone…
Read more
To follow us, we invite you to download our Android and iOS application. You can read our articles, files, and watch our latest YouTube videos.