| HN Mirror

We're talking about electric cars, where VW does indeed needs a lot of catching up to Tesla.

Not that they actually plan to catch up. In May 2018 their official plan was to make 1 million electric cars by 2025 (https://electrek.co/2018/05/29/vw-electric-vehicle-demand-eu...).

Tesla is already making ~300k per year, is on track to make ~500k within 9 months in Fremont, has already started building China plant that will add 250k within 2 years and 500k within 4-5 years, has already telegraphed building European plant for another 500k cars and will most likely start building Model Y in Nevada starting sometime 2020.

Bottom line is that Tesla will likely reach 1 million cars a year by 2022, 3 years before VW.

Maybe VW will speed up their plans but batteries don't grow on trees. Recently we learned that LG Chem wants Audi (part of VW group) to pay 10% more for batteries because demand outstrips the supply (https://electrek.co/2018/10/22/audi-e-tron-delay-software-lg...).

Tesla has been designing battery packs since Roadster days and building Gigafactory 1 since January 2015 so almost 4 years to build battery capacity for ~400k cars. As far as I know VW has no battery R&D and relies for the most important and most expensive component of ev car on 3rd party suppliers who also supply the same thing to their competitors and apparently are so swamped by demand that they can raise prices while Tesla is aggressively bringing the price of batteries down.

And it remains to be seen if they are able to create software that is as refined as Tesla's.