Can Daimler enter the electric car market where Tesla and other electric carmakers are the leaders?
After U.S. and China, now is Europe’s turn to build some of the largest battery gigafactories in the world in order to prepare the near future transition toward electric vehicles.
Beside the auto sector represented by Daimler, Volkswagen and many other European carmakers, now the utility companies in Europe (Enel in Italy) seem to be equally interested to produce more batteries in order to better store solar and wind power.
By producing more batteries, the production costs of the batteries will fall, and will ease the transition towards a greener economy and electric vehicles (will make them more affordable).
If the batteries will become cheaper, they will lead to a decrease of the price of the electric cars and will make them competitive with the regular vehicles.
In the next five years we could see that the number of gigafactories that produce lithium-ion batteries on a large scale is increasing very much especially because the price of the electric vehicles must come down.
While Tesla is selling luxury electric vehicles, and is preparing to deliver its first affordable electric vehicles (Tesla Model 3) by the end of this year, the European carmakers such as Daimler, BMW, Volkswagen and Porsche have understood that the future is electric, so by the end of the decade, they will come with a broad offer of electric vehicles in their portfolio.
Daimler is preparing to enter the electric car market controlled by Tesla and other electric carmakers?
It seems that not only Daimler, but other European carmaker companies like BMW, Volkswagen, Porsche and so on, are ready to invest in the development of electric vehicles because they have realized that a car company that will not be present on the electric car market in the very near future, is a company that will hardly pay the late entry on the EV market.
More gigafactories for Li-ion batteries in the world, will mean cheaper batteries (the price could decrease by 40%) and more affordable electric vehicles.
China wants to dominate the electric car market in the near future, so it plans to build its own gigafactory for Li-ion batteries by the end of 2018.
A broad development of the gigafactories for Li-ion batteries in the world will bring down the price of the electric vehicles and will ease the transition from the regular vehicles that pollute to the electric cars.