"Whereas we cannot exactly foresee the market (...) if you do the math on Mercedes, if you want to go close to full electrification, we need, as Mercedes worldwide, minimum 200 GWh, we made the calculation that, just roughly, that should be around for us 8 gigafactories around the world," he told Reuters.

(Reporting by Gilles Guillaume; Editing by Tassilo Hummel/Sudip Kar-Gupta)