VW announces global alliance on electric mobility

Aug 4, 2010, 14:48 GMT

Palo Alto, California - Volkswagen has announced a global alliance on electric mobility and said it was investing over five billion euros (6.5 billion dollars) a year in research and development in the segment.

'In the future, the heart of Volkswagen will also beat with electricity, and our engineers in America, Europe and Asia are laying the foundations for that in the research alliance,' VW's CEO Martin Winterkorn said.

According to the car maker, the Touareg Hybrid, launched this year, will be followed by the Jetta Hybrid in 2012 and, the year after that, by the E-Up! and the Golf blue-e-motion. Either one will also be the first full-electric vehicle by the brand in the United States.

Around 100 employees are working on the cars of tomorrow at the VW research laboratory in Palo Alto, the largest research institution of the Volkswagen Group outside Wolfsburg in Germany. Alongside the development of driver assistance systems, the focus is on electric mobility. Research on electric mobility around the globe was being coordinated from the Wolfsburg headquarters, the company said.

Various battery storage concepts are being investigated including lithium-ion technology and so-called consumer cells, also called 18650 cells. The Electronic Research Laboratory (ERL) in Silicon Valley has been especially assigned the task of examining the battery compound of consumer cells, including the ideal packet assembling of battery cells in the automobile, as well as intelligent controls of the stored energy.