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VW wants to be the most profitable electric car company in the world

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
The Volkswagen logo is displayed at Serramonte Volkswagen on November 18, 2016 in Colma, California.

Volkswagen announced it's to spend 44 billion euros ($50 billion) on new plants, electric cars, autonomous driving and mobility services.

The war chest is to be spent in the four years between 2019 and 2023 and represents about a third of the company's total outlay allocated to the four-year period.

“One aim of the Volkswagen Group's strategy is to speed up the pace of innovation. We are focusing our investments on the future fields of mobility and systematically implementing our strategy,” Herbert Diess, the CEO of Volkswagen, said in a press release, issued after a Supervisory Board meeting Friday.

VW CEO: We will be most profitable electric car firm
12 Mins Ago | 02:22

Diess told CNBC's Annette Weisbach that he expects the German carmaker to be the most profitable maker of electric cars thanks to its economies of scale. The auto group said it wanted to improve productivity by focusing its electrification strategy within Germany, while pushing some traditional engines to multi-brand factories in eastern Europe.

German plants in Emden and Hanover will be converted to build electric vehicles, while the Volkswagen Passat family will now be built in the Czech Republic. A new location in Eastern Europe will be built for some Skoda and SEAT cars.

VW Group added that it wanted its automotive division to lower its capital expenditure ratio to 6 percent of revenues from 2020 onward.

VW CEO: Politicians are beating auto firms up
11 Mins Ago | 02:06

Diess said VW's previous “bad behavior” meant that his firm had been “beaten up” by politicians in Germany and abroad but he hoped that relations were improving.

Tesla fatal crash rate with Autopilot still no better than with human drivers

Tesla Autopilot
Since Tesla’s Autopilot was introduced back in October 2014, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made extravagant claims about its superior safety. Last month, reacting to what Musk considers sensationalized media coverage of Tesla accidents, the company released the first of its promised quarterly safety updates.

The report claimed that, compared to the U.S. automobile crash rate of one every 492,000 miles, Teslas in the second quarter of 2018 had an accident “or crash-like event” every 1.92 million miles. With Autopilot engaged that dropped to one in every 3.34 million miles.

In other words, human-piloted Teslas had accidents at about one quarter the U.S. average, by miles traveled. The rate for Autopilot Teslas was about one-seventh of the U.S. average. (The company did not say how it arrived at the benchmark figure for the U.S. average number.)

Tesla Model 3 dashboard in Autopilot testing with IIHS [CREDIT: IIHS]

According to the company numbers, cars on Autopilot were nearly twice as safe as human-pilot Teslas, buttressing Musk’s past claims.

DON'T MISS: Tesla's own numbers show Autopilot has higher crash rate than human drivers

Oddly, in its report Tesla did not break out fatal accidents, the ones that have garnered most of the sensational news coverage.
Perhaps that’s because, as it turns out, Teslas on Autopilot actually have a higher fatal accident rate than those driven entirely by humans.

Hard Numbers

Back in November, 2016 I analyzed fatal-crash data for the Model S, comparing cars driven by humans to those driven on Autopilot.

The conclusion: Autopilot had a fatal crash rate approximately double that of human-pilot Teslas—a conclusion radically different from the rosy Autopilot safety picture that Elon Musk and Tesla had so relentlessly promoted.

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Mercedes-Benz delivers first F-Cell plug-in hybrid fuel-cell SUV in Germany

Mercedes-Benz GLC F-Cell, 2017 Frankfurt Motor Show
Mercedes delivered its first plug-in hybrid F-Cell fuel cell SUV in Berlin earlier this week.

Like earlier projects from Toyota, Honda, and GM in the U.S., Mercedes is only leasing or renting the vehicles (it says “renting short-term or long-term”) to select customers in German cities where hydrogen refueling infrastructure is available. Those include Berlin, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, and Cologne.

Germany currently has 50 hydrogen fueling sites in those seven cities, and Mercedes-Benz has partnered with chemical and petroleum companies to expand the network to 100 stations by the end of 2019—and eventually to 400 stations, the company said in a release.

CHECK OUT: 2020 Mercedes-Benz EQC specs revealed (Updated)

The F-Cell reportedly has some common components with the upcoming Mercedes-Benz EQC electric SUV, which is expected to have a 200-mile range from its batteries in European driving. Mercedes officials in the U.S. have said it will have a longer range when the car goes on sale here in 2020.

Mercedes-Benz GLC F-Cell

The F-Cell's tanks hold 4.4 kilograms of hydrogen, which give it a range of 267 miles on hydrogen. And as the first fuel-cell vehicle that also has a plug-in battery, the F-Cell gets another 32 miles of range from its plug-in battery (based on a European driving cycle.)

Originally shown in at the Frankfurt Motor Show in 2017, the F-Cell has four driving modes: Battery, which runs strictly on the battery for up to 32 miles; F-Cell, maintains the charge level in the battery, using net energy only from the fuel-cell; Hybrid, which depletes both the battery and the hydrogen in the tanks in what Mercedes says is the most efficient way; and Charge, which uses the fuel cell to charge the battery.

READ THIS: Mercedes invests in pilot program to keep fuel cells alive

The motor puts out 208 horsepower, which Mercedes describes as an output that helps to “ensure high driving dynamics,” though on paper that horsepower rating falls well behind the Tesla Model X or many competing gas-powered SUVs.

Mercedes points out in its press release that it has been working on fuel-cell vehicles since it produced the NECAR 1 test van in 1994, a full-size commercial van in which the fuel cell occupied the entire cargo area. Indeed, the company was once a leader in fuel-cell vehicles, along with General Motors. Now the landscape has changed, with Honda and Toyota (and, soon again, Hyundai) as the only automakers who make fuel-cell vehicles available to consumers.

Tesla Reaching Out To US Model 3 Reservation Holders To Ask If They Want A Refund

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Published on November 15th, 2018 |

by Zachary Shahan

Tesla Reaching Out To US Model 3 Reservation Holders To Ask If They Want A Refund

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November 15th, 2018 by Zachary Shahan

Update: There’s even hotter news that Tesla has opened up the Model 3 configurator (to design and complete your order for the car) in China. As a commenter nicely summarizes, “There have been reports elsewhere about phone calls. I think this is about production planning to figure out what these remaining orders actually are. And clearing out any reservations that aren’t going to convert into orders.”

Tesla is in an interesting position. Hundreds of thousands of people put down reservations for a Model 3. Perhaps 100,000 of them have now gotten their cars (or not quite 100,000 of them, since many buyers have come in “off the street”). That most likely means that hundreds of thousands are still waiting to order their cars. Many of those people are overseas, but plenty are surely still in the United States. Who are they? Are they going to order? If not, are they ever going to ask for a refund?

One of our writers is sitting on a reservation. This evening, he received a text message from someone at Tesla asking if he wants a refund. He went on a test drive a few months ago but has otherwise not reached out about anything, so he found it a bit interesting and surprising to receive this text message on his phone.

The message was short and sweet. As you can see on the right, after a brief hello (I’ve clipped off that part to exclude the names), the sales advisor wrote, “We saw you’ve not ordered your Model 3. Please let us know if you’d like your $1k deposit returned. Thanks.”

This is interesting for a few reasons. One is that you’d think Tesla would like to hold onto the cash as long as possible, so it’s surprising to see the company offering to give it back.

That said, the money can’t really be used by Tesla anyway (it’s not counted as real revenue at this stage), so why not? With Tesla’s bank account looking as good as ever, perhaps the company decided it was time to unload some of that dead cash. Additionally, Tesla may be trying to ensure customers have a good experience and don’t feel like the company is holding onto their money longer than it should.

Some more business-y explanations may be at play as well — and the above ideas may not have anything to do with it.

Perhaps this is an approach Tesla is now using to push consumers — in a super subtle and low-pressure way — to finally move forward and order a car. The company has sent out a handful of emails over the past several months encouraging reservation holders (like me) to convert into buyers and order a Tesla Model 3 Long Range … Tesla Model 3 All-Wheel Drive … Tesla Model 3 Performance … Tesla Model 3 Mid Range — whatever’s fresh. I’ve personally received a handful of reminders (including this week) that cars are available for test drives.

Another possibility is that Tesla is eager to learn more about remaining reservation holders in the US. Are they really planning to buy a car? Are they just waiting on the $35K car? With a nudge, will they admit they aren’t going to order and accept a refund? Tesla staff are probably trying to figure out what remaining demand from reservation holders actually is so that they can plan production, shipping, and delivery schedules accordingly.

There’s also the chance the message was a one-off from a rogue employee, not a big company-wide template message. That seems unlikely, but we should find out soon enough.

We likely won’t figure out the full story behind this message. There are many possible explanations for it, and Tesla’s probably going to hold them close to its chest. But there’s always room for speculation and hypothesizing, right? Any other thoughts?

I reached out to Tesla for commentary and talked about this but did not receive any extra information.

If you’re looking to buy a Tesla, appreciate my work, and need a referral code, here you go: http://ts.la/tomasz7234

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About the Author

Zachary Shahan Zach is tryin' to help society help itself (and other species). He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director and chief editor. He's also the president of Important Media and the director/founder of EV Obsession and Solar Love. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, and Canada.

Zach has long-term investments in TSLA, FSLR, SPWR, SEDG, & ABB — after years of covering solar and EVs, he simply has a lot of faith in these particular companies and feels like they are good cleantech companies to invest in. But he offers no professional investment advice and would rather not be responsible for you losing money, so don't jump to conclusions.

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