Volkswagen To Develop New Electric Vehicles Factory In China


04/25/2019



German automaker Volkswagen plans to make investments of 5.06 billion yuan ($750.8 million) for the construction of a new electric car factory in eastern Hefei city in China through its Chinese joint venture in the country with China’s Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Co (JAC), according to reports quoting local Chinese authorities.  
 
An approval from the environmental authorities to construct a factory that would be capable of manufacturing 100,000 all-electric battery cars a year was obtained by the Volkswagen and JAC according to a document that was posted online by the Hefei Economic and Technological Development Area
 
The numbers that were included in previous official documents were confirmed by Volkswagen Group China on Thursday and said that the first model would soon be launched by the JAC-Volkswagen joint venture.
 
Development plans for the plant was confirmed by a spokesperson for the joint venture and said that the approval represented an “orderly advancement of the project”, and that company would launch later this year the E20X, the joint venture’s first electric model.
 
A pledge to increase manufacturing and bringing to markets more zero-emission vehicles as part of its growth strategy in the country has been made by the German company which is the largest foreign auto manufacturing company in China. In 2018, the company sold a total of of 4.21 million cars on the mainland and Hong Kong.
 
In the next 10 years, Volkswagen has made plans for the manufacturing of more than 22 million electric cars, the company had announced earlier, and had said that manufacturing them in China would account for more than half of them. This year alone, the company plans to launch 14 new electrically powered vehicle models for the Chinese market.
 
The launch of a research and development center was announced by VW’s joint venture with JAC last year, which was approved by Chinese authorities and the companies in 2017.  By 2020-2021, it also planned to introduce the SEAT brand to China.
 
There were reports in the media earlier this month that claimed that Volkswagen wanted to accelerate its electric vehicle development and was in talks with South Korean battery maker SK Innovation for that purpose.
 
There was a contraction in the second largest care market in the world – China, last year which was the first for the market since the 1990s. But there has been continued and robust growth in the new energy vehicle segment with a 61.7 per cent growth in NEV sales to 1.3 million units in 2018.
 
This year, new energy vehicle sales could hit 1.6 million units, said the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.
 
Volkswagen has started building a $2.5 billion new energy vehicle plant in Shanghai with SAIC Motor Corp Ltd, which will make VW’s luxury Audi AG brand cars. The new manufacturing facility would possess an annual capacity of churning out 300,000 cars annually and production would begin from 2020, SAIC Volkswagen has said.
 
(Source:www.nytimes.com)