The Volkswagen Group selected Sagunt, a Spanish town in Valencia, to install its battery gigafactory, which will also serve as support for the construction of urban electric models in the Catalan town of Martorell and in the Navarran town of Landaben from 2025 and 2026.

The execution of this gigafactory will create 3,500 direct jobs by the end of the decade and will have a capacity of 40 GWh per year. Additionally, the factory will also be able to supply the Ford factory in Almussafes, due to an agreement of “European cooperation between both firms by which they undertook to develop zero-emission and light commercial models.”

The factory will become the third in Europe for the Volkswagen Group and the official announcement will be made shortly before “the company registers, together with Seat, its comprehensive electrification proposal in the Strategic Project for Economic Recovery and Transformation in the Electric Vehicle sector and Connected.“

Sagunt: an industrial estate

This gigafactory will be located in the industrial estate adjacent to the port of Sagunt called Parc Sagunt II and will have some 5.6 million square meters of land.

The space is considered industrial land, due to the “strategic environmental and territorial declaration (DATE) of the special plan for the second phase of this manufacturing area and confirmed by the Department of Ecological Transition of the Generalitat Valenciana” through a published statement last February 17.

The Generalitat stated that as a result of this environmental authorization, the region is considered a “magnificent” position to host large-scale industrial investments.

M. Rodríguez

Source: publico.es

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BMW Chairman of the Board of Directors Oliver Zipse highlighted that BMW is on a very good path with the transformation process, prepared its plants for electromobility and expects further growth in sales in 2022. “That is why over the next year we will increase our number of employees up to five percent, “said Zipse.

One of the reasons, he pointed out, is the high demand for electric models. “Our i4 has been sold for months now, as has the iX,” Zipse said. “Next year the electric seventh will be no different,”.  However, admitted the president of BMW, the lack of charging stations constitutes a brake. “In Europe, the number of electric cars is currently growing five times faster than infrastructure.”

For that reason, he also said he was against banning internal combustion engines: “That would inevitably lead Germany’s largest industry into a contraction scenario.” Zipse called for CO2 targets to be tied to binding targets for charging infrastructure.

Meanwhile, he estimated that the lack of semiconductors could have come to an end within a year thanks to the investments of the car manufacturers themselves: “I hope that by the end of next year we will have a practically normal situation.“

Source: dpa

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