Kubi skrev:
Paywall. Kan du saxa lite?
The chief executive of Porsche has warned the cost of lithium-ion batteries, by far the most expensive component in an electric car, is unlikely to drop for at least five years, complicating carmakers’ attempts to generate profits from emissions-free models.
Oliver Blume, whose company has just begun delivering its first battery-powered sports car, the Taycan, told the Financial Times the industry would face supply constraints for the “next few years”.
“I don’t expect decreasing costs in batteries, because there is a big demand and we still have a bottleneck in production capacities,” he said.
Although Porsche has fixed contracts with battery suppliers such as South Korea’s LG Chem, Mr Blume raised the possibility that rivals could see their price soar, before the electric car market becomes big enough to benefit from economies of scale. Porsche is part of the Volkswagen Group and Mr Blume sits on the VW board.
The forecast will frustrate many European car manufacturers, who must sell hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles over the next few years to comply with EU regulations.
The industry had been hoping that battery-powered models, which are sold either at a loss or for very small returns, would begin making money as the cost of their core technology plummeted.
Porsche’s own Taycan, which is the first European rival to Tesla’s Model S, will not be profitable for a few years, Mr Blume confirmed, despite already securing 30,000 orders.
The rapid growth of electric vehicles, spearheaded by VW’s ambitious plans to produce 26m emissions-free cars in the next nine years, is expected to almost quadruple the global demand for batteries by 2025.
The German group is investing in its own, domestic cell-building facilities, in conjunction with Swedish developer Northvolt, but is largely reliant on Asian battery suppliers, which dominate the industry.
Europe is staging a late surge into battery manufacturing, with the likes of BASF and Opel receiving state aid to build so-called gigafactories on the continent, but those facilities are unlikely to come online for a few years.
Nonetheless, VW’s boss Herbert Diess told the FT last week that the carmaker had secured enough battery supply to see it through until 2023, by which point it hopes to have produced 1m electric cars.
Those comments came as production of emissions-free vehicles at Audi, one of VW’s brands, in Belgium was forced to a halt because of delays in the delivery of battery cells.
“That’s a typical thing that happens when you ramp-up a new technology,” said Hildegard Wortmann, Audi’s board member responsible for sales.
But Ms Wortmann, who earlier in her career helped launch BMW’s electric models, warned that the price of Audi’s battery-powered models were unlikely to drop, even if battery costs were reduced.
“Whenever we get cost savings in terms of scalability,” she said, “[Audi will invest] into better cell performance and cell intensity etc to build on the reach.”
Ms Wortmann added that electric models would need to have a reach of about 500km before the savings in battery costs could be passed on to consumers.