World’s biggest carmakers finally plug in to electric

Volkswagen’s leaders have approved a five-year spending plan that aims to further the German carmaker’s goal of transforming itself into a leading force in electric cars.

The move by Europe’s largest carmaker by unit sales, which was announced last Friday, will see it spend more than €34 billion (US$40 billion) on electric cars, autonomous driving and new mobility services by the end of 2022.

Several carmakers have unveiled plans to mass produce electric vehicles, spurred on by government crackdowns on engine emissions, falling battery costs and an increasing range of electric cars.

China has set strict quotas for electric and plug-in hybrid cars that come into effect from 2019. It has a target of two million so-called new-energy vehicle (NEV) sales by 2020 and has signalled that longer term it will phase out the sale of conventional petrol-engine cars.

Here are carmakers’ plans for a technology that has played only a marginal role until now:

Tesla Motors

Next year could be make or break for the US pure-play electric vehicle maker, which just launched its first mass-market car, the Model 3.

The company made only 260 Model 3 cars in the third quarter because of what it called production bottlenecks. It had planned to build more than 1,500.

This month it pushed back its target for volume production by about three months, saying it was difficult to predict how long it would take to fix production bottlenecks.