"Battery cells - Made in Germany" - After years of fundamental discussions about electric drives, Germany has lost a lot of time in supplying its own cars with domestically produced battery cells.
Today, almost nobody disputes that German car companies should focus on electromobility... Nevertheless, some experts still disagree as to whether Germany should or must produce all the cells itself. This is why the big companies are still shying away from making huge investments - and prefer to buy their batteries from Asia, even in the medium term.
Our podcast guest Sven Bauer (Founder & CEO BMZ Group) is a true veteran of European battery development. In 1994, he founded the BMZ Group, which has since focused on battery construction for special applications (dialysis machines, cosmetics, gardening tools, etc.). For many years, manufacturing the battery cells required for these applications was not a profitable business model. Since 2017, the subsidiary "TerraE" has been doing this for the German group of companies. The only downside: cell production still takes place in Asia.
In the podcast, Sven Bauer talks about Germany as a battery location, the financing of cell manufacturers, European scaling problems in production, extremely fast development cycles in Asia and new cell chemistries and where they are used.
