Volkswagen backpedals in china: revives 1990s engine to save ev sales
Volkswagen just bolted a gasoline engine into its newest Chinese EV. Not to drive the wheels—just to keep the battery from dying. The ID.Era 9X, unveiled last week in Shanghai, is the German giant’s admission that 400 km of pure-electric range no longer sells in the world’s largest car market.
Li auto trolls the newcomer
Within minutes of the launch, Li Auto posted a GIF of a snail dragging an extension cord. The caption: “Six years to copy what we ship since 2019.” Li’s own EREV lineup—electric motors, tiny battery, 1.2-litre range extender—moved 376 000 units last quarter, outselling every imported EV brand combined. The punch line stings because it’s true: Volkswagen’s “new” range extender is a re-bored EA211 block that first fired up in a 2012 Golf.
Inside the 9X, the ancient iron block is tuned to 92 hp and locked at 3 200 rpm, acting as a generator that never touches the driveshaft. Engineers stuffed it under the hood to push total range past 1 000 km, the magic number for buyers who measure distance in provinces, not kilometres. The software layer, however, is straight from Wolfsburg’s 2020 MEB toolbox—no AI-optimised heat maps, no battery pre-conditioning based on plateau altitude. Drivers in Xinjiang already report a 17 % efficiency drop when the heater kicks in at –15 °C, something Li Auto’s fleet learnt to solve two winters ago.
Scale beats story
BYD and Li Auto crank out an EREV every 42 seconds across three coastal megafactories. Their secret isn’t the motor—it’s the supply chain: Shenzhen-printed circuit boards, Suzhou-made silicon-carbide inverters, LFP cells priced at $42 per kWh. Volkswagen, by contrast, flies the EA211 casting dies from Kassel to Anting, adds a Bosch inverter made in Germany, then ships the entire crate to Changchun. Logistics alone add $1 800 per car.
Dealer data leaked to TechBloom show 9X pre-orders at 3 100 units nationwide after ten days. Li Auto’s newest L8 sold 28 000 in the same window. A Beijing sales manager shrugs: “Customers test-drive both, then ask why the VW still has a start-stop button. They want phone-on-wheels, not heritage.”
The cost of catching up
Volkswagen’s china chief Ralf Brandstätter swears the module is “transitional,” but engineers inside the company confess the next dedicated platform has been pushed from 2026 to 2028. Meanwhile, Li Auto is road-testing a solid-state EREV prototype that deletes the generator altogether, replacing it with a 900-cc micro-turbine running on bio-methanol. If it reaches showrooms first, Volkswagen’s interim fix will look less like a bridge and more like a pier.
The market has already voted: 52 % of “new-energy” vehicles sold in china this quarter have a fuel cap. The number climbs every month. European boardrooms can either ship their legacy engines east or watch their joint-venture profits evaporate. One thing is certain: the era of moral victories for “pure” electric drivetrains is over. In china, pragmatism sells; purity sits unsold on the lot.