Global automakers plan to invest more than half a trillion dollars for batteries and electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030, according to a Reuters study.
According to a report, this suggests that they are increasing investment to draw customers away from fossil fuel vehicles and achieving increasingly difficult goals for decarbonization.
The most recent study suggests that automakers will invest approximately $515 billion between five and ten years to design and develop new EVs and steer away from combustion engines.
However, forecasters and executives from the industry are concerned that demand for EVs might fall far below the ambitious targets without substantial incentives or more investment in grid capacity and charging infrastructure.
Brian Maxim, the head for global forecasting of powertrains at AutoForecast Solutions, equates the rising EV investment commitments with the Cold War: “Once a few manufacturers announced EV programs, everyone else had to announce their own or be viewed as being left behind.”
However, he also said that “this leaves a lot of vehicle manufacturers planning significant volumes for a vehicle category that has unknown consumer acceptance and will have minimal to no profit” for years.
In the meantime, regulatory and political pressure is mounting on automakers worldwide to start phasing out the production of vehicles powered by fossil fuels such as hybrids in the next 10 to 15 years while increasing the production of fully electric models.
Many nations, from Singapore to Sweden, have stated that they will prohibit the sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2030. U.S. President Joseph Biden has declared that he would like 40 to 50 percent of sales to be electric vehicles in 2030.
The German VW Group, which is still recovering financially from the diesel emissions fraud scandal, continues to be the leader in the market, having greater than $110 billion of EV and battery investment commitments until 2030. These commitments, which amount to greater than 20% of the total industry, justify VW‘s aggressive plans for millions of EVs across Europe, China, and North America over the next ten years.
Chinese automakers, led by VW and GM local partner SAIC Motor, have announced more than $100 billion in investment goals in the coming decade. Japanese automakers have a long way to go in this regard by having Honda, Toyota, and Nissan making commitments of just under $40 billion.
This is not including the hundreds of billions of dollars committed to a new production capacity by the world’s biggest battery companies, most working in conjunction with their automaker partners.