Volkswagen and Renault aren't ready to go fully electric just yet
Wednesday, 11 May 2022
The bosses of both Volkswagen and Renault have warned against going all-in on electric vehicles, despite both companies pushing to introduce more fully-electric options to their fleets.
Renault boss, Luca de Meo, told Financial Times’ Future of the Car summit that while Renault is “very committed to EVs… it is apparent that combustion-engine sales - including hybrids - have yet to reach their peak. There are challenges, across societal, financial and ecological perspectives that should be considered.”
He went on to say that batteries and financial accessibility are the two biggest hurdles to clear at the moment, with the current battery technology only good for vehicular use when its overall capacity is above 85 % of what it had from the factory.
That means, because of degradation, something like a 100kWh battery pack will need to be replaced when it drops below 85kWh of usable capacity.
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“Then there is the lifetime CO2 - the cradle-to-grave figure - for a car, the answer to which is not so obvious. Some alternative fuels, or hybrids, can be cleaner than EVs on these measurements,” de Meo added.
Solid state batteries are expected to fix a lot of the problems in current battery technologies, but they won’t be ready for prime time until around 2025, if not later.
Volkswagen has said it will have them by 2024, while Nissan recently said its solid state tech won’t be on the road until 2028.
Meanwhile, Toyota already has working solid state packs on the road, with a due date of around mid-decade. BMW is projecting similar timings.
Nissan’s Chairman of Europe, Guillaume Cartier, said that solid state batteries will have a ratio of 1:3 compared with today’s technology, meaning the batteries will be either one-third the size of a current pack offering the same range, or the same size with three times the range.
The price of EVs is also a concern, with the current project price parity date of 2025 still speculative because of raw material inflation, de Meo said. EVs could still ask a premium over ICE if manufacturing and supply costs increase over the next few years.
At the same summit, Volkswagen CEO, Herbert Diess, said that while he wants 25% of the Volkswagen Group’s sales to be electric by 2025, up from the 6 to 8% for this year, added that growth wasn’t restricted by a lack of demand, but instead the infrastructure surrounding EVs, or lack thereof.
“We need the correct plants to be modified or built, the battery production capacity to be available and to build a secure, sustainable supply chain.
'The customer needs the correct infrastructure to be put in place to live with the cars.”