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Automotive Industry
The EU Commission has approved €267 m in subsidies from the Slovakian government for the Volvo Cars electric car plant near Kosice. Series production is scheduled to start there in 2026.
Volvo Cars announced the plant in Slovakia with an annual capacity of 250,000 electric cars in July 2022. Only electric vehicles are to roll off the production line on site. The Slovakian government wants to subsidise the project with €267 m – and has now been given the green light by the EU Commission. “The measure will contribute to the EU’s strategic objectives relating to job creation, regional development and the European Green Deal,” it announced.
The background to this is that state aid must be authorised by the EU Commission so that the subsidies do not have a disproportionate impact on competition in the internal market. This is to ensure that individual companies (from certain countries) are not favoured or disadvantaged. Interesting in this context: around a year ago (2023), the EU relaxed the rules on state aid in order to counteract the US government’s Inflation Reduction Act; in other words, to keep important economic players in the EU.
In the case of the Volvo Cars factory in Valaliky near Košice, the Slovakian government’s investment of over a quarter of a billion euros can now go ahead. According to the EU, Volvo Cars will invest €1.2 bn in the project and create at least 3,300 direct jobs. Electric cars are to be built in Slovakia on the basis of an advanced version of the SPA2 platform. The Scalable Product Architecture 2 is a purely electric platform, in contrast to the SPA, which has been in use since 2014. Volvo also ordered two 9,000-tonne giga presses from the Italian manufacturer Idra for the production facility. These are intended to greatly simplify car production.