Volkswagen built one battery cell for 80% of its future electric cars

One design for most of the group

Volkswagen Group has stopped letting each of its brands choose its own battery cell, the sealed unit inside an electric car that stores and releases power. It built 1 design instead, a prismatic cell, a flat, rectangular shape rather than a round one, measuring 256 by 24.8 by 106 millimetres. Volkswagen calls it the Unified Cell and says it is meant to power 80% of its electric cars by 2030. Production started for real in December 2025, at a plant in Salzgitter, Germany, run by PowerCo, the battery making arm of Volkswagen Group.

The Salzgitter plant is built to make 20 gigawatt hours of cells a year to start, a measure of how much energy that many cells can hold and deliver. That is enough, by PowerCo own count, for around 250,000 electric vehicles a year, and it can expand to 40 gigawatt hours if needed. PowerCo supplies only about half of the group total demand for the Unified Cell. Gotion, a battery maker in which Volkswagen holds a stake, builds the rest under a contract that runs from 2026 to 2032. Two more plants building the same cell are under construction, in Valencia, Spain, and Saint Thomas, Canada.

In just three years, we have built an entirely new company, developed a competitive product, and completed a cell factory along with its upstream supply chain.

Frank Blome, PowerCo chief executive. Source 2.

A shared diameter, not a shared cell

Tesla cylindrical cell, a round, tube shaped cell named for its size, the 4680, measures 46 millimetres across and 80 millimetres tall. At least 9 other named cell makers have moved to building cells at that same 46 millimetre diameter, but not the same length. A 2022 BMW plan called for 2 different lengths of its own, 95 millimetres for saloon cars and 120 for sport utility vehicles, neither matching Tesla 80.

BMW newest statement, from July 2026, confirms cylindrical cells are now in real production, at Plant Woodruff in South Carolina, for the new BMW iX5, built on what BMW calls the cell to pack principle, meaning cells are wired directly into the battery pack with no separate module stage between them. That statement does not restate a length or name a cell supplier, so the 95 and 120 millimetre figures above still rest on the 2022 plan.

Plant Woodruff demonstrates how quickly we can scale a new battery concept to industrial production.

Rich Everly, Vice President of Production at BMW Group Plant Woodruff. Source 5.

An older attempt that mostly did not stick

Years before Volkswagen built the Unified Cell, Germany own auto industry association, VDA, short for Verband der Automobilindustrie, proposed 6 standard prismatic cell sizes for different classes of electrified vehicle. An independent battery engineer who studied the VDA sizes states that only 1 of the 6, the size built for plug in hybrid cars, actually became common, and warns that cells sold under that size still vary underneath the label. Volkswagen own new Unified Cell does not match that surviving VDA size either.

What standardization has not proven yet

No source states what a shared cell format actually saves in money, time or wasted material. PowerCo says its standardised design "offers economies of scale, cost advantages and technological flexibility," but states no figure for any of it. Three separate standardization efforts touch the same industry, at 3 different levels of success, and even the newest and biggest of them has not converged with either of the other 2.