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Volkswagen has confirmed something that's long been rumoured - that it's prepared to share its potentially ground-breaking MEB electric car technology with rivals.
Dr. Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen AG, commented: "Our Modular Transverse Toolkit proved we are platform experts. Over 100 million of our vehicles are based on that particular platform. With the MEB platform, we are now transferring this successful concept to the electric era and opening it to other carmakers. The MEB is to establish itself as the standard for e-mobility. Based on the MEB, we will make individual mobility CO2-neutral, safe, comfortable and accessible to as many people as possible. Because the MEB even makes the cost-efficient production of emotional small-series vehicles like the ID. Buggy possible. I am delighted that e.GO has become the first partner to use our electric platform as the basis for a jointly-defined vehicle project."
e.Go is a startup electric car maker, based in Aachen in Germany, which is the first such company to sign up to Volkswagen's offer of sharing the MEB. It was founded by Prof. Dr. Günther Schuh in 2015.
Cutting-edge projects have been developed at the RWTH Aachen Campus. Agile teams at e.GO work on a variety of cost-effective and customer-focused electric vehicles for short-haul traffic. Schuh said: "We are extremely pleased the Volkswagen Group offered us this cooperation. We can contribute e.GO's agile product development and our strength in building small-series vehicles based on extruded aluminum spaceframes. And the MEB platform will make us faster, more robust and cost-efficient."
Is this one of the world's biggest car makers emulating Tesla's commitment to sharing its patents with potential rivals, as a way of speeding up electric car development? In part, possibly, but in reality, it's also a way to help recoup the vast costs of developing the MEB platform. Volkswagen was stung, in part, into a €30 billion investment into electric cars by the fallout from the Dieselgate scandal. Although VW's sales have held up well in the wake of the scandal, it has had to pay significant fines on top of the expenditure on R&D. Licensing the tech will help Wolfsburg pay for the work it's put into MEB, on top of spreading it out to its various VW Group brands.