Ford Partner Volkswagen Aims To Be Global Leader In EVs By 2025

Earlier this month, we reported that Ford’s new partner, Volkswagen, had revealed its new “Accelerate” plan, which effectively doubled the percentage that EVs will consist of in its planned European sales by the year 2030, as well as obtaining a market share of over 50 percent for all-electric vehicles in the U.S. and China by the same year. However, Volkswagen has an even more aggressive plan to become the global leader in EVs, a title it plans to achieve by 2025 at the latest.

“Electrification and digitalization are changing the vehicle faster and more radically than ever before,” said Herbert Diess, Volkswagen CEO. “Economies of scale are absolutely critical for both issues. Our platform roadmap will put us in an even better position to tap the full potential of our Group alliance. By pooling the strengths of our strong brands, we will thus be able to scale up our future technologies even faster and maximize the number of people benefiting from them.”

To achieve that goal, the German automaker is currently scaling up its Modular Electric Drive Toolkit (MEB) platform, which will underpin a future all-electric Ford model. By 2022, 27 MEB-based models will be offered throughout the Group.

As early as next year, VW will launch its first vehicles based on the Premium Platform Electric (PPE), with faster acceleration, higher ranges, and shorter charging times. By the middle of the decade, VW wants to develop the Scalable Systems Platform (SSP), the next generation of all-electric, fully digital, and highly scalable vehicle platforms, on which models of all brands and segments can then be built.

In addition, Volkswagen is also pursuing a platform strategy for batteries and charging. Starting in 2023, the Group will introduce a unified cell to be scaled up around the world. By 2030, the unified cell is to be installed in around 80 percent of all the Group’s electric vehicles across brands.

This move will reduce the cost of battery cells by up to 50 percent in the entry-level segment and by up to 30 percent in the volume segment. To ensure that demand for battery cells can be met, Volkswagen and its partners plan to build six cell factories with a total capacity of 240-gigawatt hours in Europe by the end of the decade. VW is also driving the expansion of its public fast-charging network in Europe, China, and the U.S.

We’ll have more on Volkswagen’s electric vehicle push soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for 24/7 Ford news coverage.