Herbert Diess, the CEO of VAG, held the conference last July named “New Auto” to announce the mid-term and long-term strategies, including the keynote address of the development and operating plans of batteries, charging infrastructure, the self-owned software company CARIAD, and the autonomous driving technology, etc.,. And the most important fundamental for the transformation and growth of the whole group is the SSP (Scalable Systems Platform). The SSP will unify all the platforms in VAG nowadays including MQB, MLB, MSB, MEB, and PPE, etc., to become the most influential platform in the age of BEVS from 2026, and it’s predicted to produce 40 million cars with different brands, models, powertrain setup in the group during its life cycle. In addition to establishing the R&D center of SSP in Wolfsburg, Germany, VAG will also establish the R&D center and manufacturing factory in Anhui plant (China) that is purchased from JAC. Especially in China market, Volkswagen take full control of the operation of Anhui R&D center and the factory with 75% of share after decades of operating joint-venture factories with SAIC and FAW, and it will hopefully become the leader in the BEV market of China following the Tesla’s sole proprietorship of Shanghai GigaFactory. This move will be the key in the sales competition between the two major car groups VAG and Toyota in the next decade.
The flexible structure of SSP is just like the name “Scalable” that the simplify the combination by modularization to shorten the development period of new cars on this platform from 54 months to 40 months, and the time needed to manufacture one new car is also reduced to 10 hours. In comparison with BEV platforms nowadays, SSP’s concept of design utilizes the CTC (Cell-to-Chassis) and the vehicle-centralized, zone-oriented Electrical/Electronic Architecture to fulfill the OTA feature downloading and updates for all systems. SSP utilizes the most advanced VW.OS version 2.0 as the basis that supports several driving configurations including single-motor FWD, single-motor RWD, dual-motor AWD, or quad-motor AWD. The newly-developed battery is claimed to charge from 0% to 80% in just 15 minutes, and the range could achieve 1,000 kilometers. Moreover, SSP also provides Level 4 autonomous driving technology. Certainly, it might not be possible for CARIAD to complete the fully-autonomous driving technology on their own, because Volkswagen cooperated with Ford to invest on the American startup company Argo.ai a few years ago, then approached the major German Tier One supplier Bosch, and they approached Huawei’s department of autonomous driving in China recently, which indicates that there’s still a long way to get through the technological threshold of fully-autonomous driving technology. It’s reported that someday SSP will even be allowed to open to other brands to develop their own BEVs (just like the MEB being opened to Ford for utilization) to amortize the huge cost of development. And these plans are backed up by budget plan in the Planning Round 70 (VAG’s annual planning conference in every end of the year) last year, which takes 56% of total budget to conduct the development of e-mobility and digitalization. I could even assume that SSP will not only belongs to VAG, but the application will spread over major traditional carmakers around the world to become the outstanding benchmark in the era of BEVs.