VW ‘can overtake’ Tesla by 2025 as biggest EV manufacturer

• Published date: 30 June 2022

"Elon [Musk] must simultaneously ramp up two highly complex factories in Austin [Texas] and Grünheide [near Berlin] - and expand production in Shanghai. That will cost him strength," Volkswagen Group chief executive Herbert Diess told workers at VW's Wolfsburg headquarters on Tuesday

"We have to seize this opportunity and catch up quickly - by 2025 we can be in the lead," Mr Diess added.

The confidence from the VW chief stands in contrast to comments he made just last month when he told a Financial Times conference that VW "didn't expect [its] main US competitor to be so fast and well prepared", and that it would be a "tight race" to be the dominant electric vehicle producer by the middle of the decade.

VW, which has invested more than €52 billion in the development of battery-powered vehicles, plans to sell approximately 700,000 electric cars worldwide this year, less than half of the 1.5 million that Tesla chief executive Elon Musk suggested his brand would be able to deliver.

However, Tesla, which coped better than most competitors during the early stages of the semiconductor supply crisis, has more recently been plagued with production problems at its so-called gigafactories in the US, Europe and China.

'Money furnaces'

Mr Musk told a Tesla owners' club last month that the company's plants...