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posted by janrinok on Friday August 05 2022, @05:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the Porsche-electric-boogaloo dept.

Porsche's new companies are all about electric bikes:

In the future, you may come across a lot more two-wheeled Porsches on the streets. The luxury automaker has launched two new joint ventures with Dutch company Ponooc Investment B.V., and they're both all about electric bikes. Porsche eBike Performance GmbH is based in Ottobrunn near Munich and will develop components, including motors and batteries. Anything it creates will then be used by P2 eBike GmbH, the second joint venture based in Stuttgart, to manufacture Porsche-branded e-bikes for consumers that the company plyans to launch starting in the middle of the decade. 

Porsche is far from a newcomer in the e-bike space. In 2021, it debuted two electric bikes inspired by the Taycan and were made to complement the Cross Turismo, which has a rear carrier. Those bikes, however, along with their motors and gear shifting systems, were manufactured by Japanese bicycle industry giant Shimano. With one company developing parts and another working on the consumer bikes themselves, the upcoming products the joint ventures will release will be all (or at least mostly) Porsche.

The components business will use the e-bike drive systems develop by Fazua, a company Porsche recently acquired, as noted by Electrek. However, it will also develop e-bike systems under the Porsche brand name — it will even sell the technology it designs to other brands. As with anything Porsche, the bikes under the new ventures will most likely not come cheap: Its Taycan-inspired bikes, for instance, set buyers back at least $8,500 at launch, with the sports model selling for prices that start at $10,700.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 07 2022, @01:16PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday August 07 2022, @01:16PM (#1265421)

    Well, Porsche is also most definitely about status. They talk about performance heritage, etc. but deep down inside, they all know: it's a club, just like Ferrari and to a lesser extent BMW, and to join you just have to own (or lease) a car...

    I agree that serious cyclists will shun the Porsche products en-masse, but I think I mentioned above: for every serious cyclist there are 10+ poseurs, so the question becomes: can Porsche appeal to the poseurs in sufficient quantity to support a product line?

    I think not in bicycles, but in the world of cars and car racing they do. At any given "open competition" autocross type event, you'll usually see about 1% Porsche representation, and for every one seen in open competition there are two who compete in more 'exclusive' marque specific events. Porsche has legit competitive chops at some of the higher levels of auto racing, but when you get down into sub-0.1% wealth individual owner-drivers, the price/performance ratio isn't really there. I mean, you pay your Porsche money and you get something that is not entirely embarrassing to drive on the track, but you could definitely get better performance per dollar elsewhere. What you really get with the Porsche is entree' to the marque specific events, and they smell like a Country Club (my father has been a member since I was about 12...)

    Now, "e-drive made by Porsche" might carry a little brand value in the larger marketplace, maybe enough to mark up the motor by 10% or so, and you don't have to run the whole service and support network from Porsche to do that. I put a V6 conversion kit in my Miata, and while I am perfectly satisfied that it's a 275hp Ford Duratec, it comes from an (ooooh) Jaguar S-Type, and the engine design for the Jaguar variant was developed in part by (aaaah) Cosworth and (mmmmn) Porsche. That "brand value" in turn helped to sell over 100 kits, which is why I went with that particular kit: because they had the experience of 100+ kit builds all in one place, something the guys who are just yanking (best hp/$ ratio) Duratecs out of old Lincolns don't have.

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