Volkswagen ID.4 electric SUV coming soon

volkswagen id.4 electric suv coming soon

Volkswagen ID.4 electric SUV coming soon

German automobile manufacturer Volkswagen will launch a fully imported all-electric sport utility vehicle ID.4 in India later this year to test consumer readiness in the local market, said company executives.

Electrification is one of the company’s priorities which will play out in the country in three stages, Volkswagen Passenger Cars India brand director Ashish Gupta told ET.

“The first part involves bringing some cars from our global portfolio into India, like the ID 4, as an FBU (fully built up). That’s a market introduction and testing of the market to see how our portfolio fits. The second part, through parts and components, involves local assembly for economies of scale and increased volumes. The third part, planned for 2026, is local electrification, as scaling up electrification involves localisation.”

Gupta declined to share details of the electric vehicles the company is looking at launching in India but said Volkswagen wants to be part of the transformation in the automotive landscape in the country. “We want to be part of the inflection that happens in the Indian market. From creating an ecosystem and having manufacturing processes at the industrialisation level, we plan to be a part of this transformation,” he said.

In 2023, about 82,000 electric vehicles were sold in the country, up from 38,000 units in the previous year and accounting for 3% of the total passenger vehicle sales.

“Currently, the choice is limited, so there’s limited scope for growth. When we all come with our mass-electrified products, it will give a boost to the market,” Gupta said.

Carmakers have readied for launch in India in 2024-25 as many as a dozen electric vehicles, including Maruti Suzuki eVX, Tata Curvv, Skoda Enyaq, Kia EV9 and Mahindra XUV e8. It will be the highest number of electric vehicle launches in the country in a fiscal and will nearly double the choice for consumers looking at driving home a battery-powered car.

Hardeep Singh Brar, National Head Sales and Marketing at Kia India said, “More than 14 electric vehicles available in the market today are priced above Rs. 40 lakh. There are only limited models priced up to Rs. 30 lakh, restricting the options for customers in the mass market. As more electric cars come in at affordable prices over the next two years, charging stations come up, penetration will go up.”

Electric vehicles are likely to comprise 18-30% of new car sales by the end of the decade, depending on the pace of development of charging infrastructure, according to industry estimates. It would mean sales of nearly a million electric cars in the market every year by 2030, even as per conservative estimates.

Volkswagen’s interest in the fast-evolving electric vehicle segment in India comes amid geopolitical tensions in the West which have pushed the European firm to explore strategic growth opportunities in emerging countries.

“Given the geopolitical tensions and the developments we are seeing across spheres – the Chinese and the American – we can no longer create one platform and expect it to work in both spheres. But this is making us strategically look at other opportunities,” Thomas Schafer, global CEO of Volkswagen Passenger Cars, said in an interview last year. “India was in focus, but there is a lot stronger focus now.”

While a blueprint to determine fresh investments, product interventions and capacity expansion in the country is being firmed up, the company intends to maintain the pace at which Volkswagen has grown in India since the implementation of its India 2.0 strategy.

In a fresh start, the Volkswagen Group invested €1 billion under the strategy to heavily localise the global MQB AO vehicle platform and develop products tailored to meet the needs of Indian consumers across Skoda and Volkswagen brands. Since then, the company has launched two sport utility vehicles (VW Taigun and Skoda Kushaq) and two sedans (VW Virtus and Skoda Slavia), which have been received well by local customers.

Volkswagen India expects volume growth of 15-20% year-on-year in 2024, after an 8% increase to 43,700 units in 2023.

For more news like this visit The Economic Times.

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