Why Volkswagen sees Canada as a ‘logical option’ for a ‘gigafactory’

Ontario and Quebec have mostly clean hydropower with significant capacity. If Canada wins the plant, Sweeney said it will likely be somewhere between London, Ontario and the Greater Toronto He Area West.

“We know of two large plots of land available for industrial development, one in St. Thomas and one in Hamilton,” he said. “This part of the state also has the transportation infrastructure and labor needed for such a large investment. It’s also close enough to the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee.”

Last year, the automaker’s Chattanooga plant built 112,123 of the 544,031 cars the automaker produced in North America, according to the Automotive News Research & Data Center. He builds large crossovers Altas and Atlas Cross Sport and his ID.4 EV compact crossover.

In a tweet on Dec. 13, Ontario’s Industry Minister Vic Federi said he and Prime Minister Doug Ford had met with Volkswagen and Powerco executives for the third time since April. They discussed “how Ontario is reducing the cost of doing business by $7 billion a year,” Fedeli said.

Quebec, which has seen a flurry of investments in its EV supply chain this year, also offers a “competitive proposition,” said Flavio Volpe, president of the Auto Parts Manufacturers Association.

If VW chooses to process critical battery minerals in Canada, “Given the cost and source of electricity, it’s probably better done in Quebec,” he said.

Volpe expects VW to announce a decision on the winning site in the first half of 2023.

Sweeney said the plant will likely be about half the size of a planned $5 billion battery cell plant in Windsor, Ontario. The joint venture between Stellantis and LG Energy Solution will employ at least 2,500 people and is expected to have the capacity to supply 450,000 he 100 kWh packs annually.

“Based on VW’s US production, this is expected to be smaller than the LG-Stellantis plant in Windsor, but still a significant investment,” Sweeney said. It “at least he will create 1,000 jobs, maybe more, and a lot of these jobs will be in the engineering/technical field.”

job postings in the right place

Meanwhile, Volkswagen has started recruiting employees for PowerCo’s Canadian office, said company spokesman Thomas Tetzlaff. The job listing includes a Raw Materials Purchasing Manager responsible for negotiating supply contracts with Canadian mining companies.

VW’s site search announcement in North America also included a promise to expand its partnership with Belgium-based battery materials supplier Umicore NV. In September, the two companies established a joint venture in Europe to produce cathode active material (CAM), a key ingredient in battery cells. The two companies plan to jointly invest €3 million to produce his CAM for 2.2 million of his VW vehicles annually in Europe by 2030.

The collaboration is poised to cross the Atlantic as Volkswagen pursues cell production in North America. On December 1, the two companies signed an initial non-binding agreement to work toward his CAM’s firm supply contracts for up to 550,000 North American vehicles annually by 2030.

In July, Umicore announced plans to build a $1.5 billion integrated manufacturing facility for cathode and precursor battery materials near Kingston, Ontario.