The United States faces major challenges in accelerating battery production to facilitate the transition to electric vehicles, including issues with mining and supply chains for key metals, Volkswagen AG’s top US executive said. Used to be.
Volkswagen AG’s top US executive said Thursday that the United States faces major challenges in accelerating battery production to facilitate the transition to electric vehicles, including attracting skilled workers, mining for key metals and supply chain issues. have to do.
Volkswagen Group of America chief executive Scott Keogh told an Automotive News forum in Washington that the move to EVs is “the biggest industrial transformation in America.”
Automakers and battery companies are investing billions of dollars to build new battery plants and EV assembly plants across North America as they ramp up electric vehicle production. Keogh said the move, to focus on vehicles powered by advanced new batteries instead of gasoline, requires the United States to overcome a series of challenges.
These challenges include attracting enough skilled workers, dramatically boosting and facilitating U.S. mining for critical minerals to produce lithium batteries for EVs, supply chain issues and, more broadly, health care, education. And addressing infrastructure is involved, Keogh said.
Keogh told Reuters on the sidelines of the forum that the US battery industry could potentially employ hundreds of thousands of people by 2030.
“It comes down to labor, it comes down to infrastructure, it comes down to investment,” Keogh said.
President Joe Biden has set a goal of 50% of new vehicle sales being electric or plug-in electric by 2030, but has not supported phasing out sales of gasoline-powered vehicles by a specific date.
Keogh estimated that the United States is making 150,000–200,000 batteries a year and that seven years from now “we need to make 8.5 million batteries a year”.
“It’s a scale of investment that’s honestly going to make the Industrial Revolution look like a cake walk. It’s massive,” Keogh said.
Keogh also said the United States needs to do more to boost manufacturing capacity. The US manufacturing sector has fallen from 17 million jobs in 2000 to 12.8 million today, nearly reaching pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels.
“We need to build a collective ecosystem to turn America into a manufacturing society again. I think America has become a service economy,” Keogh said. “The challenge of getting someone who is working at Starbucks, taking a 20-minute break, smoking a cigarette and now jumping into a factory … is a whole new world.”
Keogh said long shifts are very different for factory workers.
“It’s brutal, tough, challenging work,” Keogh said.
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