VW Makes Big Bet on EVs

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Volkswagen is diving into electric vehicles with the goal of selling 300,000 annually by 2018, and it has tapped an early pioneer of the modern EV to help hit that goal.

VW Group hopes to move 10 million vehicles a year worldwide by 2018, and company boss Martin Winterkorn says cars with cords could comprise 3 percent of that.

“In urban centers, this share could be a lot higher,” Winterkorn says, according to Reuters.

Volkswagen announced earlier this year that we’d see an EV by 2013. The Up! E-Motion electric city car and an electric Golf are the two vehicles under consideration. “One of the two will be the first all-electric VW in the U.S.,” Winterkorn said, according to Motor Trend.


Winterkorn says battery costs remain the biggest hurdle to widespread adoption of electric vehicles — a point he is hardly alone in making — and says lithium-ion packs cost 500 to 1,000 euros ($647 to $1,294) per kilowatt hour today. The upper end of that range is a bit high, but his figures are in the ballpark we hear others are playing in.

VW, which is working with Chinese manufacturer BYD on battery tech and has opened a lab at its Electronics Research Lab in Palo Alto, California. It is led by none other than Martin Eberhard, the co-founder and first CEO of Tesla Motors. Volkswagen quietly tapped him for the job 18 months ago, and he’s almost sold his bosses on using commodity cells in VW packs.

“They’re slowing coming around,” Eberhard told Motor Trend.

Using off-the-shelf lithium-ion batteries is the same approach Tom Gage and Alan Cocconi of AC Propulsion pioneered and Tesla Motors adopted to create the Roadster. Although VW is exploring a similar approach, the technology it is using is vastly different, Eberhard says.



Read More VW Makes Big Bet on EVs | Autopia | Wired.com