VW signs e-vehicle startup e.Go as first partner for production platform
Reuters / Die Welt
Volkswagen has signed German startup e.GO Mobile as the first external partner for its modular platform for electric vehicles (EV), reports Ludwig Burger for Reuters. The partner will use VW’s underlying platform for electric cars – the so-called Modular Electrification Toolkit (MEB) - to “bring e-vehicles to market that complement Volkswagen’s model offering,” the carmaker said in a statement. A specific vehicle has yet to be decided on jointly, it added. Philipp Vetter wrote in Die Welt: “The fact that Volkswagen now cooperates with a potential competitor pays testimony to the enormous pressure on the car industry.”
E.GO is about to launch production of its subcompact electric car e.GO Life, and aims to bring an electric minibus to market in a cooperation with major German car industry supplier ZF Friedrichshafen. The company is headed by Günter Schuh, who is a professor at Aachen Technical University and who also helped develop Deutsche Post’s successful StreetScooter e-van.
VW announced in January it wants to establish its newly developed underlying platform for electric cars as an industry standard by licensing it to competitors. The MEB “skateboard chassis” is the basic building block for dozens of different electric models Europe’s largest carmaker plans to launch by 2025. Some investors and analysts think the VW chassis may give the German company a vital edge in the new era of battery-powered cars.
