VW plans to sell 500,000 ID.4 electric cars per year

VW is hyping the launch of the ID.4 electric SUV coming next week with new releases, and in a new interview with executives today, the automaker said that it plans to sell 500,000 ID.4 vehicles per year.

Over the last month, VW has been hyping the launch of the ID.4 electric SUV by gradually releasing more information about the vehicle.

Most recently, we got our first look at the ID.4’s interior and the electric SUV’s towing capacity.

Now Volkswagen has released an interview with Ralf Brandstätter, CEO of the brand, and Thomas Ulbrich, member of the Board of Management responsible for e-mobility, talking about the ID.4.

In the interview, Brandstätter said that VW plans to sell 1.5 million electric cars per year by 2025, and they aim for ID.4 to account for ~500,000 of those sales:

Volkswagen wants to become the world market leader in e-mobility — but that won’t happen by itself. The Volkswagen brand is therefore investing around 11 billion euros by 2024. As a compact SUV, the ID.4 has, in our view, the best prerequisites for being successful in a large scale in all important markets. We therefore expect the Volkswagen brand to produce a total of 1.5 million e-cars per year by 2025. And the ID.4 is likely to account for around a third of this. The ID.4 will thus become the driving force behind our reorientation a hundred thousand times over.

On the production side, VW is planning for that capacity with production already starting in Germany and China.

They are also building a new factory in the US to produce the electric SUV in 2022.

On the demand side, Ulbrich is confident that the ID.4 will fit nicely in the popular SUV segment:

SUVs are in high demand by an ever-increasing number of customers. They offer an overview, safety, and comfort. In the USA and China, SUVs are the most popular vehicle segment. In Europe and Germany, too, market shares are steadily increasing, with compact models in particular booming. The ID.4 is our first electric SUV — and it clearly targets the volume market. It offers the space, flexibility, and all the advantages that customers appreciate in SUVs.

Volkswagen is going to fully unveil the ID.4 next week, and deliveries are expected to start in the coming weeks.

Electrek’s Take

I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to become a reality.

There’s definitely precedence for SUVs selling more than 500,000 units per year.

As far as I know, there are four models fitting in that category: Toyota RAV4, Honda CRV, VW Tiguan, and Hyundai Tucson.

The ID.4 is going to start at roughly $40,000, which is going to be more expensive than those vehicles, but the cost of ownership will be cheaper and incentives in several markets will make it cheaper than those four vehicles before accounting for gas savings.

I can’t wait to see the electric SUV in full next week because if VW is really planning for 500,000 units per year, it could truly be a disruptive EV.