A stack of gray shipping containers four stories high and longer than a soccer field. Frank Blome sits at his desk on the ground floor of the temporary accommodation and looks directly at the mound of earth piling up at the edge of a large construction site. A new crane has been in place since today, and building construction can begin. The ambience suits Blome, who is not a site manager but oversees the largest construction site in the Volkswagen Group. Because here in Salzgitter, in the middle of nowhere in northern Germany, where Volkswagen has been assembling more than 800,000 combustion engines every year, battery cells for electric cars are to be manufactured from 2025. Not just a few, not just to be able to discuss with Asian suppliers on an equal footing, as other car manufacturers put it. A year’s charge should be enough for at least half a million electric cars.
The new plant, which is being built right next to the old one, will cost two billion euros. And that’s just part of the 20 billion sum that Volkswagen is investing. Six factories in Europe are to make the largest car company in Europe self-sufficient in an electric future. The activities were bundled in the new subsidiary Power Co, an unsuspicious name and yet a Dax candidate with an announced annual turnover of 20 billion euros.