Daimler announces a €500 million investment in a new battery factory in Germany

[Morgen]

[QUOTE]Daimler announced today an important €500 million ($543.5 million) investment in a new battery factory in Kamenz, Germany, through its ACCUmotive subsidiary. The company already has a relatively small battery plant at the location, but it purchased 20 hectares of land adjacent to the existing plant and plans to build a new factory to produce li-ion batteries for the electric vehicles of its Mercedes and Smart brands.
To be clear, two years ago, ACCUmotive invested about €100 million to expand the current plant, which now has 20,000 square meters (~215,000 sq-ft) of production aera, but this new investment is for an entirely new factory of 40,000 square meters (~430,500 sq-ft) of production space.
Daimler Chairman Dr. Dieter Zetsche on the announcement:
[QUOTE]“To get closer to fully electric driving, we keep investing big in the key component of emission-free vehicles: powerful batteries. We are now devoting another 500 million Euros to build a second battery factory in Germany. This underlines our commitment to the consistent expansion of electromobility.”
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The battery pack of Mercedes’ only all-electric vehicle, the B-Class, is manufactured by Tesla Motors with battery cells from Panasonic, but the automaker already confirmed it wouldn’t renew Tesla’s supply contract.
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Construction at the new factory should start later this year, according to Daimler, and production should start in summer 2017.
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[URL="http://electrek.co/2016/03/01/daimler-500-million-battery-factory-germany/"]Source[/URL]

[AntonioR]

You can hardly wish a bigger company seriously entering the EV market than Daimler, and with that €5,000 incentive for electric vehicles in Germany this will be a great for EV in near future.