While some models won’t be available again until 2023, there are long wait times for a range of others, chief financial officer Arno Antlitz said Tuesday. He did not say which models they were.
The demand is improving returns of battery-powered cars that are now expected to reach parity with combustion-engine vehicles ahead of schedule.
“We see better scale, we see better margins, we see high customer demand,” Antlitz said on a call with reporters.
“Originally, we thought it takes two to three years until we see the parity of ICE and battery-electric vehicles.”
VW’s group sales of fully-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles last year jumped more than 80% to about 762,000 units.
Europe’s biggest automaker is pushing ahead with the industry’s biggest rollout of electric cars to challenge Tesla Inc.
While the pandemic and crippling shortage of semiconductors have hampered the effort, VW last week outlined a robust outlook for the year that impressed analysts amid multiple supply pressures and uncertainty over the war in Ukraine.
Russia is a key exporter of host of inputs, including nickel and palladium as well as steel, while the ability of manufacturers to pass on higher costs to consumers is limited.
Car prices have already rocketed as the chip shortage idled plants amid strong vehicle demand. Disruption from the war in Ukraine has forced VW to shut plants more recently.
“Raw materials are clearly a headwind for us,” Antlitz said. “There might be also the time when we need to pass on some of the increases to the market.”
In 2021, Volkswagen’s most popular battery electric vehicle (BEV) model worldwide was the ID.4, which lived up to its name as a world car in its first year on the market.
The ID.4 was the most frequently delivered of the 263,000 BEVs with 119,650 units sold, followed by the ID.33 (around 76,000), the e-up!4 (41,500) and just under 18,000 units of the ID.6, which Volkswagen offers only in the Chinese market.
In Europe, the ID.4 topped the BEV charts in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Ireland. The all-electric SUV was also successfully rolled out in the United States with nearly 17,000 units being handed over to customers. In China, the vehicle already ranks second among all-electric SUVs.
