German car makers reliant on others for "battery cells"

Chinese Prime Minister "Li Keqiang" is expected to take part in a signing ceremony at a summit in Berlin on Monday for Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd "CATL" to build the plant in the eastern state of "Thuringia".

BMW has awarded a contract worth just over 1 billion euros "$1.2 billion" for CATL to make cells for electric cars, while Volkswagen has picked CATL and South Korea's Samsung and LG Chem to deliver $25 billion worth of batteries.

Tesla founder "Elon Musk" has also talked about locating a battery "Gigafactory" near the Franco-German border, in the vicinity of its Grohman Engineering pision that has built a production line for Tesla's Nevada plant.

Plans by a Chinese company to build a battery cell factory in Germany should serve as a wake up call for the national car industry, whose lack of its own production capacity risks leaving it exposed in a dawning era of electric mobility.