Volkswagen still doesn’t have a full all-electric car program from the ground up in production, but it is already seeing demand for EVs increasing and it decided to turn to its compliance EV, the e-Golf, to satisfy demand.
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Options are still limited today for an all-electric commercial van. Nissan owned the market with its e-NV200 all-electric van, but now VW and Daimler are coming up with competitors in the segment.
The former even started deliveries to customers for a test program this week.
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The Los Angeles Auto Show is now open to the public and they will have the chance to see quite of few electric vehicles displayed at the event. Here we take a quick look at most of them with pictures.
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VW has been unveiling a lot of all-electric vehicle concepts over the last year with the goal to bring them to market relatively soon, but that doesn’t mean globally.
Today, they debuted their all-electric SUV concept in the US, the I.D. CROZZ, and confirmed the vehicle will make it to the US in 2020.
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Volkswagen has been making a lot of noise about electric cars lately. Announcing huge investments and new concept models, trying to recover their reputation after the dieselgate scandal. Its newest electric push comes from somewhere new: racing. While VW group has been involved in electrified racing before, with the Audi Formula E team and with several wins from Audi’s retired hybrid Le Mans car, the Volkswagen brand hasn’t yet undertaken electric racing on their own.
This changes next year, when Volkswagen will enter a car into the famous – and difficult – Pike’s Peak International Hill Climb. Details are light on VW’s entry, all we have to go on so far is a silhouette – pictured above – and a promise of all-wheel-drive. But it’s clear that VW are going after the electric prototype record – 8:57.118 by Rhys Millen in the Drive eO PP03. That car had over a megawatt of power available (1367hp), so expect VW’s entry to have similar horsepower if it wants any chance of getting that record.
While it started getting popular in some European markets, VW e-Golf still hasn’t launched with official pricing in the US.
Today, VW finally revealed pricing for the all-electric vehicle today and it’s only a slight price hike.
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Just as Volkswagen announced its updated electrification plans with a massive new $84 billion investment in electric cars and batteries, the German automaker also unveiled a new electric vehicle concept.
The vehicle is called I.D. CROZZ and VW presents it as “a crossover of an SUV and a four-door coupé.”
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Volkswagen updated its plans for electric cars with a complete overhaul of its investment strategy.
After announcing an initial investment of $10 billion in EVs earlier this year, which was still smaller than the German automaker’s investments in gas-powered cars, they now promise to spend up to 70 billion euros (~$84 billion USD) in order to bring 300 electric vehicle models to market by 2030.
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After unveiling a new all-electric and autonomous microbus concept called I.D. BUZZ earlier this year, VW is now announcing that it will bring the vehicle to production in 2022.
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It’s not often that a company sells ~70 times as much product as its main competition. But according to an interview with VW brand chairman Herbert Diess, published on VW’s employee web magazine “Inside” and reported on by Reuters, that’s the case between Tesla and VW.
In the interview, Diess claims “in the old world [our competition] is Toyota, Hyundai, and the French carmakers. In the new world it is Tesla.” He goes on to state that the reason for this is because Tesla “has abilities that we currently do not have,” particularly in engineering.
Matthias Müller took the helms of Volkswagen following the Dieselgate scandal and he quickly positioned the German automaker to push for electric cars, but he is now reportedly facing an internal backlash from the company’s leadership, which is not entirely sold on electric vehicles.
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VW has been quick to compare its upcoming first all-electric vehicle built from the ground up, codenamed I.D. Concept, to Tesla’s Model 3.
Specs-wise, it appears to be competitive with the Model 3 on paper, but they never gave a precise price range until now.
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Last week, we reported on Volkswagen’s research group unveiling an all-electric car platform and a mobile charging robot prototype.
The latter seemed to only be a high-level research project, but now Volkswagen announced that it is working with robot manufacturer Kuka to make it a reality.
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The $2 billion that Volkswagen has to invest in electric vehicle infrastructure in the US as part of its court settlement for the DieselGate scandal is starting to turn into real charging stations.
They opened the first fast-charging stations in the Washington, D.C. area.
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Volkswagen is preparing to unveil two more all-electric vehicles as part of its series of new I.D. concepts that will serve as the basis of its new electric car strategy.
They should be the third and fourth vehicles on the new platform and hit production in 2020-2021.
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As part of its new mission to become a leader in electrification around the world, German automaker Volkswagen confirmed that it received government approval in China for a new joint venture with Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group (JAC Motor).
The deal was approved for the annual production of 100,000 all-electric vehicles.
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Even though VW has been making some large-scale commitments to electric vehicles, more recently through a giant $10 billion investment over the next 5 years, it can be hard to take them seriously when the only EVs that they built from the ground up are some “weirdmobile” concepts – like the one pictured above.
Nonetheless, the German automaker is hyper confident that it can go from laggard to leader in electric vehicles. CEO Herbert Diess went as far as saying that “anything Tesla can do, we can surpass.”
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While electric vehicle enthusiasts are tired of only seeing electric concepts coming out of VW, it looks like the German automaker is ready to back those concepts with a massive 9 billion euros ($10 billion) investment to bring them to production.
Volkswagen chief executive Matthias Müller conceded that “the future of driving is electric” and they plan to be part of it, but they are having trouble reconciling it with their current internal combustion engine business.
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Volkswagen recently submitted both its plans to invest $2 billion in electric vehicle infrastructure in the US as part of its court settlements with the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the DieselGate scandal.
We reported on the main details of the plan for California, which includes installing ultra-fast 320 kW chargers, and the plan for the whole country, which includes a ‘nationwide 150 kW+ fast charging network’.
Now other automakers are contesting the plans and want to have a say in how VW should spend that money. Some ideas are OK, though the contestation could result in slowing the rollout of the EV infrastructure, while other demands are plain ridiculous.
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After Audi unveiled its all-electric crossover this morning, another Volkswagen brand, VW, unveiled its own all-electric crossover concept.
The vehicle, called I.D. CROZZ, is the latest member of the series of I.D. concepts for VW’s next generation all-electric vehicles using the German automaker’s Modular Electric Drive Matrix (MEB).
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As part of its court settlement with the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the DieselGate scandal, Volkswagen agreed to invest $2 billion in electric vehicle infrastructure in the US. Last month, we reported on their plan for California, which includes installing ultra-fast 320 kW chargers, where they need to spend a significant part of the settlement.
But the rest of the US is not going to be left empty-handed. VW and the EPA released the national plan and it includes a “nationwide 150 kW+ fast-charging network” along highways, which is by far the most exciting part of the plan for EV drivers.
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VW has been unveiling a series of new all-electric concept vehicles called “I.D. concepts”. While only concepts for now, the German automakers presents them as the basis for a series of new electric vehicles to use its MEB platform and go into production around 2020.
After a compact car and a minibus, VW now confirms that the next vehicle is an all-electric crossover and it will feature something that will sound familiar: “autopilot mode”.
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Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess confirmed that they are putting all their effort to ready their new MEB platform and launch their new electric vehicles in 2020 – just in time to comply with European and Chinese emission standards.
The German automaker’s leadership said that they will have to bring EVs to market in volumes in order to comply with those standards, which proves that strict emission standards can encourage automakers to invest heavily in electric vehicle production.
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Chinese clones are not exactly rare in the electric vehicle sector. We saw a copycat of Lit Motors’ bike last year and just yesterday we reported on Faraday Future, a China-backed company, accusing NIO, another China-backed company, of cloning its design.
But this latest example goes a few steps further and completely copied the Volkswagen e-Up electric car.
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