The wide-ranging announcement talks about VW's plans
around the world with a focus on electrification and connectivity.
The German car giant shifts its focus to clean-energy vehicles after the dieselgate emissions cheating scandal. Brand chief Herbert Diess claims that the automaker aims to sell one million electric cars
per year by 2025. This would make it the global market leader in
electromobility. Herbert Diess also added that the switch to electric
will be funded through new investments and economies of scale, and is a
crucial part of the troubled brand's efforts to reinvent itself.
Last Friday Volkswagen
announced the biggest revamp in its history, saying that it would cut
30,000 jobs to save 3.7 billion euros ($3.9 billion) a year by 2020,
while ramping up investment in future technologies such as electric cars, self-driving cars and digitalisation.
Herbert Diess said that the industry will undergo more fundamental
change over the next 10 years than ever before. He predicted that "the
breakthrough" of electric cars was just four or five years away and
would be driven by environmental concerns. He has no doubt that for most
customers the electric car will soon be the better alternative.
The
shake-up at Volkswagen's core brand comes as the group tries to recover
from the biggest crisis in its history after it admitted last year to
installing emissions cheating software in some 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide.
The so-called defeat devices could detect when a vehicle was undergoing
regulatory tests and lowered emissions accordingly to make the cars
seem less polluting than they were. The crisis hurt sales and damaged
the image of the proud German company, pushing it to its first loss in
over two decades last year. Even before dieselgate, the VW brand had been struggling with profitability, weighed down by high costs and low productivity.
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