One of the biggest players in the automotive world, Volkswagen, recently warned that the cost of developing and selling electric cars “will be higher than expected.” Hm! If electric cars are so expensive why do people build them in their garages with old batteries? Seems like a hole in their logic!
I don’t know about you, but I don’t really trust “Big ICE” on this one. And there’s no bigger player in this than VW, which is only pivoting to electric cars because it screwed up so bad in Dieselgate.
VW didn’t exactly clarify what was gonna make all this so much more expensive, as Bloomberg reported yesterday and as we noted in our morning news roundup:
VW had originally earmarked the shift to battery power to cost 20 billion euros ($23 billion). Now Chief Executive Officer Herbert Diess says this won’t suffice, without providing a new figure. The company needs to reduce expenses more to be able to invest in future technology and weather crises, he said.
“The burden for our company, such as the cost of bringing to market electric cars, will be higher than expected,” Diess said in a joint interview with labor head Bernd Osterloh in VW’s internal newsletter. “This is particularly so since some of our competitors have been making more progress.”
Sure, sure. Electric cars are significantly simpler than internal combustion cars, so simple that a bunch of college kids can build one powered by the sun but VW is gonna have a hard time because... its competitors are faster than it?
I don’t know, y’all, but anyone trying to tell me that a car powered by the electric grid is going to be punitively expensive is skimming a little cream off the top if you ask me.