Volkswagen enters battery business with $20B investment

Re:Volkswagen enters battery business with $20B investment by bretpiatt on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @07:22PM (#32089978)

For VW to build 10 million electric vehicles to keep numbers up [1], at 60kWh per vehicle which approximately the midsized ID.3 [2], they need to build roughly 12x this capacity, so ~$240B investment which is about what the whole company is worth today [3].

[1] https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2020-full-year-glob...

[2] https://www.drivingelectric.com/volkswagen/id3/range

[3] https://ycharts.com/companies/VWAGY/enterprise_value

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Re:Volkswagen enters battery business with $20B investment by rgbrenner on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @08:30PM (#32090478)

The 20b covers 6 of these plants… totaling 240gwh or 3m vehicles (4m ID.3s).

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Re:Volkswagen enters battery business with $20B investment by oblio on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @07:26PM (#32090016)

They don't have to build absolutely every battery, they can still work with partners.

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Re:Volkswagen enters battery business with $20B investment by bluGill on Thursday July 14, 2022 @09:29AM (#32095851)

This is also a first investment. They can wait a year and invest double in a larger plant - when building something for mass manufacture you start with a smaller plant to learn how to do it, and then a larger one applying all the expensive lessons learned the hard way from the first. Sometimes this cycle is repeating dozens of times.

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Re:Volkswagen enters battery business with $20B investment by nine_k on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @07:54PM (#32090230)

Won't a next factory cost less, due to the accumulated know-how, optimizations, improvements, etc?

I suppose the investment goes not just to civil engineering and land.

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