Seat's future electric battery assembly plant is taking shape, a key piece for the electrification process of the Martorell complex. Works began at the end of 2023 and a hill on the automaker's land had to be excavated to erect the steel structure of the building, a phase of the work that is about to finish. After an investment of 300 million euros, the company expects the facility to be operational by the end of next year, with about 500 workers, mainly recycled from other processes in the assembly line.
The King visited the works of the new plant this Friday, accompanied by the Minister of Industry, Jordi Hereu, the President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, the CEO of Seat, Wayne Griffiths, and the mayors of Sant Esteve de Sesrovires and Abrera, Enric Carbonell and Jesús Naharro. The State delegate in Catalunya, Carlos Prieto, and the leader of the PSC, Salvador Illa, also participated. Throughout the visit, Felipe VI was reunited with his first car, a golden Seat Ibiza SXi.
The electric battery cells, manufactured in PowerCo's gigafactory in Sagunto, with its start-up scheduled for 2026, will arrive at the plant by train. It will be in Martorell where they will be assembled, taking into account that each car will need a hundred cells to form a battery. From Seat, they point out its high final weight as one of the advantages of assembling as close as possible to the assembly lines, considering that each cell weighs two kilos and together they will end up totaling 200 kilos, which complicates transport.
Once the batteries are assembled, they will leave the plant directly through a 600-meter bridge that will connect with the automotive workshops, reaching the corresponding assembly lines. It is estimated that the facilities will have the capacity to assemble a battery every 39 seconds, with a daily production of 1,400 batteries, a figure that corresponds to the maximum annual production capacity in Martorell, currently set at 350,000 vehicles.
The electric battery assembly plant, financed with European funds, will have a total area of 64,000 square meters. The central area, of about 40,000 square meters, will be where production takes place. The sides will be used for logistics activities. It will have 11,000 solar panels to supply 70% of the energy it will need, in addition to utilizing wastewater, gray water, and rainwater. To excavate the land where it is located, 300,000 cubic meters of earth had to be removed, a figure equivalent to 90 Olympic swimming pools.
While the new parts of the Baix Llobregat facilities are being defined, in which 3,000 million euros will be invested for its electrification, Seat will transfer the production of the Seat Ibiza and Seat Arona this summer. It will do so to prepare the line for the urban electric cars already assigned to the Martorell plant, the Cupra Raval and the Volkswagen ID.2all, with the same platform. Production of the Cupra Raval is expected to begin in late 2025 and the Volkswagen ID.2all models in 2026. The German group still needs to assign a second platform to guarantee the future of the plant.
"There is no plan B"
The president of Seat, Wayne Griffiths, has once again demanded more investment from the Government to boost the electric car in the country. This is the message Griffiths has repeated most in recent years, accompanied by the dilution of the Seat brand in front of the new and more expensive Cupra. Since the company launched the Future Fast Forward project, endowed with 10,000 million euros, the executive always warns that Spain, the second largest automotive producer in Europe, does not dedicate enough resources to leave behind the combustion vehicle.
"We are falling behind in the sale of electric cars and in the installation of charging points; we only reach half of the European average and are very far from other countries like France, Germany, and Portugal," Griffiths remarked. "We need Spain to commit to electric mobility. The future of the automotive industry in our country is at stake. We cannot fall behind because there is no plan B," he insisted, accompanied by Thomas Schäfer, chairman of the board of directors of Seat and CEO of Volkswagen.