This and the other MB announcement come at interesting times. Both these companies are slightly on the back foot in Germany. BMW supposedly took the strategic route of redirecting investment into electric a while back. they already have the i3 and the i8 (which, depending on how you look at it, could be the most beautiful or the most ugly car in the world) and in a few months the X7 hybrid SUV. VW has Golf and Passat hybrids, whereas MB just discontinued their B series leaving them with no electrics at all. BMW had nothing to show for the last few years going up against MB's latest line-up refresh and the poor sales over the last few years reflects how dated-looking BMWs have been. I'm thinking BMW has another ICE refresh to go before they too go fully electric/hybrid, and it might happen sooner rather than later.

Tesla is probably an important competitor but at the moment I'm more likely to believe BMW, Audi and MB could pull off a production capacity of a million+ hybrids per year each by 2020 if they put themselves to it.

* I wrote a similar comment in the MB submission.

Finally, the EV battle is getting exciting!

I'm very curious who will win the race to the middle, that is mass EV production: either (1) Tesla becoming a mainstream car manufacturer, or (2) the mainstream car manufacturers learning to do EVs.

I'm inclined to favor the Big Auto. I believe they can easily catch up with Tesla's EV technology, whereas Tesla will have a hard time ramping up production to Big Auto scale.

So pretty much every major automaker is saying that in the next 5 - 10 years they will either be fully electric or significantly so. I don't see that ending well for Tesla or at least for their business line of making cars. Full credit to them for showing what an electric car can be (i.e., something more than a golf cart), but they also have awakened the mainstream automaker giants, who can completely dominate them in dealerships, manufacturing capacity, and worldwide presence.

Don't forget VW has to build EV infrastructure worth billions in U.S. as part of their false emissions settlement. Makes a lot of sense to capitalize on all the new chargers you build with the car offering...

How much debt do they have to take to make such an investment?

Why so many cars? 300!

I have a question. If one were to believe batteries or EV's are our future, what kind of business or startup opportunities does it present?

The push towards electric cars is an ostensible step in the right direction from an environmental standpoint, but most commentators fail to consider the massive quantities of hazardous toxic waste produced as a byproduct of neodymium mining.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...

http://e360.yale.edu/features/boom_in_mining_rare_earths_pos...

LOL. Their market cap isn't even that high.

VW announces "XY" $. Compare this with Tesla's style, "Starting next week."

I guess this announcement from VW got fast-tracked now that China is about to announce a ban on gas-powered vehicles China, in turn probably wants to go forward with that not for environmental reasons, but because they have a near monopoly on the world's supply of rare earths (which the electric vehicle's batteries require)

I get nightmares thinking what that will do to electricitry prices. The graph of how they rose is already awful.

And now imagine if the tax collected on mineral oil for gas falls away cause everyone drives electric. And know that there isn't a specific car electricity to tax.

Thinking the government would just eat this loss without thinking of ways to make the people pay would just be naive.