By Joan Faus
MADRID (Reuters) – Volkswagen will submit a new request to Spain for European Union funds as it weighs up whether to manufacture an additional new electric vehicle (EV) there, the chairman and CEO of the automaker’s Spanish unit SEAT told Reuters on Tuesday.
The manufacturing decision will not only depend on the allocation of such funding, but also on the viability of the project when compared to Volkswagen sites elsewhere, timings and other factors, Wayne Griffiths said.
Volkswagen has already decided to start producing EVs at SEAT’s plant in Catalonia in 2025 and at VW’s Navarra facility around the same time. It will also build a battery factory using funds from Spain’s so-called PERTE programme, that mainly consists of EU pandemic relief aid.
Last year, Volkswagen was allocated 397 million euros ($423 million) from PERTE. The programme, however, has only allocated 30% of its total budget so far, with investments required to have started by 2025.
Spain will launch a second, more flexible PERTE allowing investments until 2028, and a parallel simpler aid scheme, Industry Minister Reyes Maroto told a conference on Tuesday.
Griffiths told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference that the PERTE funds received by Volkswagen so far were “far away from our expectation”, but the upcoming programmes offered “a lot of opportunities”.
“We have a lot of things that were rejected in the PERTE 1 that we would like to try hopefully with the flexible PERTE 2,” he said, mentioning battery assembly and a new electric car as possibilities.
As SEAT chairman, Griffiths said he would want to produce a new EV at its plant, but added: “I need good reasons to win” the projects.
“There is interest from Volkswagen in further development of the industry base in Spain, (but) at the end of the day we have to see how feasible, viable it is in the international context,” he said.
He said those issues were discussed in a Feb. 7 meeting between Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume.
($1 = 0.9380 euros)
(Reporting by Joan Faus; Editing by Andrei Khalip and Mark Potter)
