To beat Tesla, Volkswagen bets on making its own EV batteries

Volkswagen AG’s yearslong effort shows the challenges.

Analysts forecast that the German giant, already one of the world’s two largest auto makers by sales, will be its biggest EV maker as soon as next year.

Making a cost-effective battery, though, is key to whether the push makes Volkswagen any money.

VW unveiled its first battery production plans in 2019. Industry analysts say the company is further along than most of its old-auto peers in developing an in-house battery capacity, but it initially underestimated the scale and complexity of the task, according to company executives.

VW also struggled to find qualified engineers and managers in a field—chemistry—where it had practically no knowledge. It is still fighting to bring the cost of its batteries down to a sustainable level, and the technology it is developing for future batteries is still unproven.

The batteries in VW’s current models are outsourced, but the company has said it plans to start building its first battery plant in Germany next year. More factories are expected to come online between now and 2030, VW has said, including four in Europe, as well as plants in the U.S. and China. Longer term, VW is investing in experimental technology that it believes could yield cheaper, longer-lasting and more stable batteries.

Most incumbent auto makers including General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. are looking to make their own batteries. VW’s own plan matches the scale of its overall EV bet. The company spent nearly $30 billion to develop new technology, including electric vehicles, between 2018 and 2020, more than any other legacy auto maker. It has said it would spend more than $41 billion developing electric vehicles from 2021 through 2025, not including the costs of the battery plants.

Thomas Schmall, chief executive officer of VW’s components business and the board member in charge of research and development, said the need to bring battery making in-house can be boiled down to a simple fact: Batteries make up about 50% of an electric car’s value.

Buying such a central component from suppliers, Mr. Schmall said, would be “as if we had said in the past we don’t want to build engines, we can buy them from the market."

From the start, VW’s battery effort was modeled after Tesla’s, VW officials have said. Tesla, the U.S. EV pioneer, makes many of its components in integrated factories that include assembly, paint and body shops and on-site battery production operated in partnership with cell manufacturers.

Catching up hasn’t been easy. One of the earliest obstacles VW faced—and still faces—was difficulty hiring qualified engineers in fields it knew very little about.

In 2018, VW poached an electrical engineer from Daimler AG. Frank Blome says he now spends much of his time searching for experts and setting up training to create a pool of specialists. Some 30% of new positions in the components group are filled by outside candidates.

“You can only become an expert if you do it yourself," Mr. Blome said of VW’s battery aspirations.

To expand its talent pool, VW has been tapping into Germany’s dual-training system that gives university students on-the-job training at a company and often a job upon graduation. VW has offered such training for years for mechanical-engineering students and now says it plans to roll it out to chemical and electrical engineers next year.

Analysts say one of the toughest challenges for VW has been matching Tesla on cost of its batteries, through economies of scale and the development of a single battery platform for all of its models. It still has some way to go. A piece-by-piece teardown of VW’s ID.3 electric vehicle by UBS Research found that VW’s batteries cost $1,300 more per car than Tesla’s. VW says it is confident that future generations of batteries will be more cost-competitive with Tesla’s.

VW’s benchmark hasn’t been standing still on technology either. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has promised new battery technology that will be cheaper to build and more efficient.

To beat Tesla, Mr. Schmall says, it isn’t enough to catch up. VW needs a silver bullet that will allow it to leapfrog the Silicon Valley company and take the lead in technology.

The company hopes it has one in QuantumScape Corp., a startup that VW first invested in about 10 years ago. QuantumScape is developing solid-state battery technology, which scientists say has the potential to be more stable and to charge faster than the liquid chemistry used in most lithium ion EV batteries.

It took years of experimentation before QuantumScape announced in December that it had achieved a breakthrough, successfully testing for the first time a solid-state battery cell of the size that would be used in an EV battery. In theory, solid-state cells are less expensive to produce and able to take a full charge in the time it takes to fill a conventional car with gasoline.

After achieving a proof of concept, QuantumScape sent cells to VW in Germany, where VW says they were successfully tested in VW’s battery lab. The batteries were charged and discharged thousands of times to test their performance and stability.

In April, Scorpion Research, an investment boutique that has shorted QuantumScape’s stock, published a report calling QuantumScape a “pump and dump" scheme—an attempt by insiders to overstate a company’s potential in order to inflate its share price and sell their holdings at the earliest opportunity.

QuantumScape’s executives have dismissed the criticism and VW has expressed confidence in the company’s claims about its achievements, after saying it had verified them in its own lab in Germany in March.

Mr. Blome said VW will decide this year whether to build a pilot production line for solid-state battery cells using the technology.

“The small cells built in the laboratory have shown that a fast charge is possible and that’s new," Mr. Blome said. “The race isn’t run yet, but basically it works."

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text