at Volkswagen will the Electric cars scarce – and therefore no longer available for their own managers. Electric cars and hybrid models as company cars would “probably not be available to order until the end of 2022,” the automaker told its 18,000 executives by email this week, according to information from manager magazin. The delivery of company vehicles that have already been ordered, it says, will “in some cases be significantly delayed”.
VW justifies this with the high demand from customers, combined with a lack of semiconductors and short-time work. In the first nine months of the year, the Group’s core brand had delivered 167,800 e-cars of the core brand, a good 30,000 more than in 2020 as a whole. In view of the bottlenecks, supplying external customers with e-vehicles is currently a priority, management has to drive combustion engines.
Originally, the group had called on its managers to choose cars that were as CO2-friendly as possible as company cars. A special rule for this was already relaxed in June due to the lack of available e-models.
Lack of chips slows production: VW is far behind its annual targets for e-cars
VW is not alone with its production problems. Almost the entire auto industry is currently not getting enough semiconductors to completely meet customer demand. VW, for example, sold in September 2021 Germany a good 20 percent fewer cars than in the already rather weak Corona year 2020.
Volkswagen has so far been significantly behind its annual targets for sales of electric cars in 2021; sold 293,000 fully battery-powered cars across the group by the end of September. A target of at least 600,000 all-electric vehicles was set for the year as a whole. Internally, the plans were even significantly higher, according to the company.
competitor Tesla apparently suffers significantly less from the lack of chips at the moment. The US electric car maker reported a record sales and a record profit in the third quarter on Thursday. The best-selling electric car in Germany in 2021 was not a VW vehicle until the end of September, but Tesla’s Model 3, which was sold 23,900 times.