VW’s electric cars spared in chip crisis
The rollout of Volkswagen’s flagship electric cars has been unaffected by the semiconductor shortages roiling the industry, easing investor concerns that bottlenecks would leave the company unable to meet strict EU emissions targets.
VW has been forced to cut overall production by at least 100,000 vehicles this year, and 7,500 workers at its Emden plant in Lower Saxony have been furloughed because of a lack of components.
But the brand’s chief executive, Ralf Brandstätter, told the Financial Times the chips crisis had so far only hit combustion engine models such as the Passat.
“At the moment it is not influencing our [CO2] target,” he said, referring to the annual EU standards with which VW must comply or face heavy fines. However, he added that the company’s entire chip supply chain remained volatile.
The next few months will “continue to be challenging”, Brandstätter said, after unusually cold weather in Texas and a fire at a Japanese plant exacerbated the shortages, but VW hoped for an “improvement” in the second half of the year.
The wider Volkswagen group, which includes Audi, Porsche and Seat, is heavily reliant on the success of VW’s new ID.3 and ID.4 electric vehicles to counterbalance combustion-engine sales in Europe.
The group was handed more than €100m in penalties after its fleet of cars sold in the EU last year missed a CO2 target by just half a gramme per kilometre driven.
The VW brand, however, surpassed its individual target by 5g of CO2/km, equating to a 22 per cent drop on 2019. In the first three months of 2020, the marque almost doubled its deliveries of fully electric cars, to 30,700.
Brandstätter’s comments came as the marque announced it would launch a new electric vehicle each year this decade, by the end of which it would have reduced its carbon footprint per vehicle in the EU by a further 40 per cent against 2018 levels.
The Volkswagen group accounts for more carbon emissions per year than many big countries. It was responsible for 369m tonnes of CO2 last year — about the same amount as the UK. Passenger cars made up 60 per cent of that measure.
The VW brand, by far the largest in the group’s portfolio, said it would invest €14bn in decarbonisation by 2025, mostly on building electric cars and converting factories to run on cleaner energy sources. The company also pledged to invest €40m in renewables, including wind farms and solar panels.
Brandstätter also welcomed plans by President Joe Biden’s administration to commit to achieving net-zero emissions across the US economy by 2050, and the EU’s proposed Green New Deal. But he called on governments to do more to make sure battery-powered vehicles ran on clean electricity.
“We need to challenge the energy sector as well. We can’t push every day for more electric cars if we’re not at the same moment pushing infrastructure for charging and green energy availability,” he said.
“It doesn’t makes sense to charge an EV with coal-based energy in Poland, for example.”
In a separate development on Thursday, VW was revealed to be under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for an April Fool’s joke, in which the company said it was changing the name of its American operations to Voltswagen.
The marketing stunt was followed by a sharp rise in the price of US-registered shares. The SEC’s probe was first reported by Der Spiegel, and confirmed by people with knowledge of the matter. Volkswagen declined to comment.