Daimler has said it plans to build 50,000 Mercedes EQC electric cars in 2020, denying a report in Germany's Manager Magazin which claimed it had been forced to cut back its 2020 production targets due to battery supply problems.
According to Reuters, Manager Magazin had said Mercedes had slashed its production target to 30,000 from about 60,000 because of a shortage of battery cells from LG Chem.
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Daimler wanted to sell around 25,000 EQC vehicles in 2019 but only managed to build around 7,000 for the same reason, Manager Magazin said.
A Daimler spokesman told Reuters production plans for 2020 had not been amended.
"Daimler plans to produce around 50,000 Mercedes-Benz EQC models in 2020," spokesman Joerg Howe told the news agency.
Daimler works council chief Michael Brecht told Manager Magazin that one of the reasons the company was struggling to meet battery demand is because Tesla bought Grohmann Engineering, a battery automation specialist hired by Mercedes-Benz to build up its own battery manufacturing capacity.
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By GlobalDataThis caused problems for Daimler which was in the midst of ramping up production at its electric vehicle battery production unit Deutsche Accumotive.
The launch of the EQC had been hampered by production problems, including a recall last October after Daimler identified a potentially defective bolt in the differential, Reuters said.
Germany's Auto Bild magazine said the launch of the Mercedes EQC in North America had been postponed by a year, until 2021, because of the production problems, Reuters noted.
