Mercedes-Benz cuts EQC electric SUV production target in half due to battery shortage, report says

Mercedes-Benz has reportedly cut its EQC electric SUV production target in half due to a battery cell shortage from LG Chem, according to a new report from Germany.

The EQC is Mercedes-Benz’s first next-gen electric vehicle from Daimler, and it is launching the new “EQ” series of EVs from the German automaker.

It’s off to a rough start.

In October, it recalled the first batch of production EQC electric SUVs over a problem that could block the transmission.

Also, production and sales have been extremely slow.

In their home market of Germany, Mercedes-Benz delivered only a few dozen units last year.

Last month, the automaker announced that EQC US deliveries are being delayed another year to 2021. At the time, Mercedes-Benz claimed it was going to prioritize European deliveries.

Now Manager Magazin released a report today that claims that the problem is with battery supply.

The publication says that sources within Daimler told them that they are revising their production target down for the 2020 Mercedes-Benz EQC from 60,000 to 30,000 units due to a supply shortage of battery cells from LG Chem.

They also commented on what happened in 2019 (via Reuters):

Daimler wanted to sell around 25,000 EQC vehicles in 2019, but only managed to build around 7,000, Manager Magazin said.

Several other EVs have been affected by battery shortage, like the Hyundai Ioniq Electric, Audi e-tron, and even the Tesla Model 3 at some point.

We released our first-drive review of the electric SUV  in May 2019, and we were fairly impressed by the vehicle.

Electrek’s Take

This is not exactly surprising. Some automakers, maybe most, have been having a hard time securing enough battery cells to support their EV ambitions.

I think it’s a result of being late at taking EVs seriously.

However, I do believe that many of them are not very serious about electrification, and I would count Daimler in that group.

So over the last year, they have been making some bigger investments to secure supply, including investing in next-gen Li-ion battery and issuing over $20 billion in battery cell supply contract.

I think that will solve the problem long-term for them, but in the short term, LG Chem and other suppliers are going to have a hard time ramping up production.