It is looking more and more that the hype for transforming to electric cars was a costly mania. The Nov. 22 insolvency declaration of Swedish battery producer Northvolt threatens Germany’s Volkswagen with yet another major loss in the range of €2 billion investing in this start-up since 2019. The VW investment was motivated by the overambitious attempt to become Europe’s leading co-producer of e-car batteries, the Northvolt start-up offered production of cheap batteries, without having any competence in this field.
As Germany’s weekly Wirtschaftswoche reported: “Northvolt’s management came up with overambitious ideas, but basically delivered nothing. It was all about scaling the business and building more and more gigafactories here and there. And as if that wasn’t enough, the startup diversified into all kinds of areas, from a battery recycling plant to a factory for batteries for electric airplanes. However, the product itself was not even fully developed yet.” So the whole setup was problematic, but Volkswagen invested anyway.
