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Volkswagen’s Power Day: Six new cell plants, new unified battery cell, charging network partnerships
Earlier today, German automaker Volkswagen held its first-ever “Power Day” event. Similar to Tesla’s Battery Day, Volkswagen outlined its plans for reducing the cost of electric vehicles, how it will supply battery cells for its massive EV push, a new “unified” battery cell, and the how company’s charging network is being funded by BP and other European-based energy companies.
Batteries and Cell Production
Every company involved with electric vehicles knows that to reduce the cost of its cars, sourcing batteries is 9/10ths of the battle. Batteries make up a substantial portion of an electric vehicle’s overall cost. With increased battery production and purchasing, EV makers hold the ability to lower the cost of their vehicles overall. Tesla outlined this last September at its own battery-focused event.
Volkswagen’s roadmap isn’t much different than Tesla’s. The company plans to increase cell production in Europe by a substantial margin, developing six new cell factories that will be fully operational by 2030.
“Together with partners, we want to have a total of six cell factories up and running in Europe by 2030, thus guaranteeing security of supply,” Thomas Schmall, Member of the Board of Management of Volkswagen Group for Technology and CEO of VW Group Components, said. The six new factories will produce cells with a total energy value of 240 GWh per year by the time they are finished. Two of the factories will operate in Sweden, with one in Skellefteå and another in Salzgitter. The Salzgitter factory will produce cells for VW’s “high-volume segment” starting in 2025 and will have up to 40 GWh per year of capacity.
Additionally, the company said that it “has decided to refocus the previous plan in relation to cell production and concentrate production of its premium cells in the Swedish gigafactory “Northvolt Ett” in Skellefteå in collaboration with Northvolt.” This factory will begin producing cells in 2023 and will be expanded to a final annual capacity of 40 GWh.
Credit: Volkswagen
New Unified Battery Cell in 2023
Volkswagen’s plan to reduce costs is funneled through battery developments and improvements. Schmall outlined this with the idea of new, more cost-effective cells that will increase range and performance. “This will finally make e-mobility affordable and the dominant drive technology,” Schmall said.
While Volkswagen plans to purchase cells from suppliers, it also plans to create cells in-house within a series of battery production facilities. In 2023, a new, unified cell will be launched and installed in 80% of the Volkswagen group’s electric vehicles. “We will use our economies of scale to the benefit of our customers when it comes to the battery too. On average, we will drive down the cost of battery systems to significantly below €100 per kilowatt-hour,” Schmall added.
“Integration of the Value Chain”
In an attempt to secure the long-term supply of its battery cells to alleviate any concerns over its transition to electromobility, Volkswagen says it will focus on partnerships with selected strategic partners. “The new prismatic unified cell also offers the best conditions for the transition to the solid state cell – the next quantum leap in battery technology, which Volkswagen anticipates for the middle of the decade. The Group focuses consistently on strategic partnerships and efficient use of resources both for batteries and for charging,” VW said. Additionally, the VW Group said it will adhere to its strategic financial targets and will continue to aim for a 6% CAPEX ratio by 2025. It also plans to have a net cash flow of more than €10 billion in its core automotive business.
Charging Network fueled by partnerships with BP, Iberdrola, Enel
Volkswagen isn’t only working on its battery plans. The company also is working on expanding its charging platform by calling upon European power companies to help with the rollout. Partnerships with IONITY and BP will establish 8,000 new charging points throughout Europe. Additionally, 4,000 150 kW chargers will be installed at BP and ARAL service stations in Germany and Great Britain. Spain-based Iberdrola will assist Volkswagen with main traffic route coverage in Spain, and Italian company Enel will help with main and urban motorways in Italy.
Volkswagen says its total investment package for the charging infrastructure will cost around €400 million by 2025 and is looking for other companies to partner with.
In North America, 3,500 fast-charging points will be installed by Electrify America by the end of the year. In China, 17,000 will be installed as well.
Credit: Volkswagen
Planned V2G Capability
While Volkswagen says it intends to “integrate the electric car in private, commercial and public energy systems in the future,” it says that vehicles using the MEB platform will support energy storage capabilities starting in 2022. Bidirectional wall boxes to energy management systems will be developed as well, allowing owners to supply power to residential buildings, businesses, or the general power grid when needed.
Volkswagen’s full Power Day event is available below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdnRfNwj1Fg
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has big plans for Las Vegas by year’s end
Elon Musk’s Boring Company says Vegas Loop stations will double by year end once again.
The Boring Company says the Vegas Loop’s station count will double by the end of the year, tying the target to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers in Las Vegas. “Vegas Loop is getting bigger – the station count will double by end of year!” the company wrote in a post on X, attaching listings for a Loop driver and a senior Loop operations manager.
The number checks out against what’s already public, with the Vegas Loop currently running 14 operational stations, while the Boring Company’s own project page lists 28 as the target for the end of 2026.
Vegas Loop is getting bigger – the station count will double by end of year!
Urgently hiring exceptional and enthusiastic Drivers and Ops Managers.
Apply here!
Driverhttps://t.co/ZUPXBYTONb
Senior Loop Ops Managerhttps://t.co/mV6V22V8jH pic.twitter.com/IZ9FqIw8WY
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) September 14, 2026
Much of that growth is tied to tunnels that are already built and waiting on an opening date. A roughly two-mile dual tunnel system under Paradise Road, connecting Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, is expected to open in stages over the coming weeks, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority chief executive Steve Hill told the Review-Journal last week. New stations at 4744 Paradise, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, and the former Gordon Biersch site would come online with it, several of them built to speed up rides to Harry Reid International Airport ahead of Formula 1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Clark County entitled Vegas Loop for 123 stations after approving 19 more in August, as Teslarati reported at the time. Entitlement and construction move at different speeds on this project, so county approval alone does not guarantee a station opens on any particular schedule.
Clark County approved 18 additional stations back in 2023, part of a plan that pushed the system’s target to 69 stations across 65 miles, doubling the network on paper for the first time. The target kept climbing after that, to roughly 93 stations by the end of that year and 104 by last year, before August’s vote pushed it to 123. This week’s announcement is the first time that doubling language has been attached to stations actually running rather than stations merely approved on a county map.
Ridership gives some sense of what a denser network could carry. Boring Company executive Mike Baier said in July that the Vegas Loop already moves around 40,000 passengers on busy convention days, a total that tops most light rail systems in the country despite the system running on a fraction of its planned tunnel mileage. Company leadership has projected ridership could triple or quadruple once the airport connector tunnels fully open.
Boring Company did not say which stations beyond those already under construction would open by year end, or whether the hiring push points to a fleet expansion alongside the new stops.
Tesla is looking to expand into a new Asian market, strengthening its presence in a region that has been bullish on electric vehicles as a whole.
Tesla officially filed to establish a subsidiary of its business in Vietnam, a report from Reuters suggests. Tesla named the entity “Tesla Motors Vietnam Limited Liability Company.”
The planned entrance into the Vietnamese market is a good sign and move for Tesla, as it has become one of the fastest-growing EV markets in Southeast Asia. It is already among the leaders in the region in both volume and electrification rate. In the first half of this year, Vietnam led Southeast Asia in battery-electric passenger car sales at about 116,000 units, up about 71 percent year over year.
Currently, Vietnamese EV drivers rely on VinFast’s V-Green network, which has about 150,000 ports, but these are primarily reserved for VinFast vehicles. Public third-party charging is fragmented and unreliable for those who do not own chargers that are dedicated to a certain manufacturer’s vehicles.
Tesla has had mixed results in Asia as a whole, and as China remains the core part of its story in Asia, the company is evidently working on expanding its footprint on the continent. Tesla’s domestic retail deliveries fell about 12 percent year over year through the first eight months of 2026.
Model Y remains a standout individual product, holding its position as one of, if not the, best-selling vehicles in the world. However, Model 3 has been weaker than it has been in past years.
Gigafactory Shanghai, the company’s Chinese production facility, still performs very well. Wholesale volumes in terms of exports have more than doubled and now exceed domestic retail sales; Giga Shanghai builds vehicles for Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and other markets. South Korea has been an explicit bright spot, with registrations doubling year-to-date and Tesla frequently appearing as the top imported brand.
Tesla just did something in South Korea that no foreign carmaker has ever done
Tesla’s entrance into Vietnam signals a broader effort to take over the Asian market and grab more market share from rivals.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
Elon Musk’s X Corp and SpaceXAI dropped their Apple antitrust suit, leaving OpenAI as defendant.
X Corp and SpaceXAI, Elon Musk’s social platform and AI venture, have dropped Apple from the antitrust lawsuit that they filed against the iPhone maker and OpenAI last year. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorneys for X and SpaceXAI moved to dismiss the Apple portion of the case, first reported by Reuters. The filing does not explain why the companies are dropping Apple or say whether a settlement was reached.
X and SpaceXAI say they intend to keep pursuing the case against OpenAI, which remains a defendant. That resolves the dispute with one company while leaving the core allegation intact against the other, with no public accounting of what changed in between.
The lawsuit dates to August 2025, when xAI and X sued Apple and OpenAI, arguing that Apple’s decision to make ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot built into iOS gave OpenAI an unfair structural advantage. The complaint claimed ChatGPT controlled roughly 80 percent of the chatbot market at the time, while Grok held only a few percent. It sought billions of dollars in damages and asked the court to unwind the arrangement.
Elon Musk’s xAI and X file antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI over AI exclusivity
The filing followed weeks of Musk publicly complaining that Grok and X weren’t appearing in Apple’s “Must Have” App Store section, though Grok ranked second in the Productivity category and X ranked first in News at the time. He accused Apple of “playing politics” and warned of immediate legal action before following through days later.
Apple and OpenAI tried to get the case thrown out, but a federal judge denied both motions in November, ruling the dispute was better suited to summary judgment than an early dismissal. That decision sent the case into discovery, which is presumably what led to Monday’s filing.
Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either 𝕏 or Grok in your “Must Have” section when 𝕏 is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?
Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know. https://t.co/3wenLZGtwG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025
The timing is notable given how Musk’s sentiment toward Apple has shifted, with Musk noting that he was open to letting Grok power a revamped Siri after a user suggested Apple replace its aging assistant with xAI’s model.
xAI, the AI venture Musk folded into X Corp last year, has since combined with SpaceX under the SpaceXAI brand. That structure now puts X, Grok and SpaceX’s rocket and satellite businesses under one roof as Musk pushes his AI ambitions beyond chatbots.
OpenAI remains the sole defendant going forward, and Musk’s companies have not said if there’s any changes to those original claims. Apple and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing.
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has big plans for Las Vegas by year’s end
Tesla looks to expand into new Asian market, strengthening presence
