Speaking of playing in the dirt...
This was probably the first English language translation of parts of the Handelsblatt interview. From Mining.com:
Speaking to German business paper, Volkswagen’s CTO Thomas Schmall flagged an IPO for the automaker’s new battery manufacturing division and all but committed the company to investing in mining.
In March, Volkswagen provided a road map to have six 40 GWh cell manufacturing plants with a total of 240 GWh of capacity by 2030. With such an ambitious program, no wonder Wolfsburg, which last year produced 9.3 million vehicles, is beginning to fret about raw materials, less those factories remain idle.
Here’s how Schmall answered questions* about the battery supply chain:
Handelsblatt: Mr Schmall, can and must you learn lessons from the chip supply crisis? How do you secure battery production?
The situation is somewhat comparable. The shift to electric vehicles is also changing the purchasing structure, our partnerships with suppliers. Up until now, we have mainly sourced our parts from tier 1 suppliers, for example from the very big players in the industry. When sourcing batteries, however, we now have to go further down the supply chain, i.e. towards the sub-suppliers of the major suppliers. With batteries, the raw material costs are the crucial factor, and they account for about 80 percent of the costs. So we also have to take care of the raw materials.
Handelsblatt: Do the big battery suppliers from Asia put up with a manufacturer such as VW intervening in their business?
We need to find a ‘collaboration model’ with these large manufacturers that provides us with sufficient leeway. We want to produce batteries ourselves, but at the same time we also want to source batteries from the outside. If we master the production processes ourselves, we become an integral part of the raw material supply chain. And we are making ourselves less dependent on the large battery suppliers. That is the rationale that guides us....
....MUCH MORE
HT: reddit's r/electricvehicles, one of whose commenters hammers home:
Coming soon to an OEM near you: near total vertical integration!
