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Porsche AG on Friday dialled[sic] back plans for its electric vehicle rollout due to weaker demand, pressure in key market China and higher U.S. tariffs, causing the luxury sportscar maker and its parent Volkswagen to slash their 2025 profit outlooks:
The move highlights the challenges for one of the most well-known car brands, which has been squeezed by its two most important markets - China and the United States - over price declines and trade barriers.
Volkswagen, Europe's top carmaker, said it would take a 5.1 billion euro ($6 billion) hit from the far-reaching product overhaul, which delays some EV models in favour of hybrids and combustion engine cars, at its 75.4%-owned subsidiary.
The changes are a major shift for the Stuttgart-based maker of the iconic 911 model, and are expected to hit Porsche's operating profit by up to 1.8 billion euros this year, it said.
[...] Porsche said it would delay the launch of certain all-electric vehicles, adding that the new SUV above the Cayenne model would initially not be offered as an all-electric vehicle, but with combustion-engine and hybrid models.
Also at ZeroHedge.
Previously: Porsche's New Cayenne Will Charge Itself Like No Other EV
Related:
- Canadian EV Sales Collapse by 35% as Gas Car Purchases Surge
- Tesla Continues Slide As Musk Warns Of "Rough Quarters" Ahead
- Electric Truck-Maker Nikola Falls Into Bankruptcy Joining a Procession of Failed EV Startups
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, @12:05AM (1 child)
Go woke go broke
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, @02:14PM
Found the pedophile.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Wednesday September 24, @08:30AM
... a viral marketing campaign [youtube.com]?
(Score: 2) by Username on Wednesday September 24, @03:15PM (2 children)
>pressure in key market China
Hum. They sell more Porsches, a luxury vehicle, in China, than any where else in the world?
I would think Germany/eu would be their key market, with the most sales.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by OrugTor on Wednesday September 24, @04:38PM
China may be where they have invested heavily and are looking to reap big returns. Europe is a somewhat predictable market inasmuch as the full range of predictor metrics is available. I would have guessed that Saudi Arabia/Emirates would be the key market but maybe that's already mature or just not that big. The thing about the luxury market in China is that although the percentage of rich people is low the absolute number is huge.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday September 25, @06:09PM
Maybe being in the same country they are more aware than the rest of us how dishonest Porche/VW is? It wasn't that long ago they were caught deliberately cheating emissions tests. Now they're advertising the speed of their cameras with a "See that?" commercial that shows things in front of the car at 1/200 of a second (I may have gotten that number wrong) when 35mm film is 24 frames per second and American TV 30, half the AC line frequency. At 1/200 of a second, only 30 out of 200 frames appear. Another touts a safety feature all new cars have, as if they're the only ones who have it.
I've owned a few VWs but I doubt I'll ever buy another. I hate dishonesty.
But IMO the Germans have the best engineers. Hasselblad cameras, Dual record turntables, they design some excellent tech.
No one born who could always afford anything he wanted can have a clue what "affordability" means.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday September 25, @08:57AM (4 children)
Google Search provided:
"How much is an electric Porsche? The Taycan range starts with the £79,200 entry-level model, and goes all the way up to the £149,300 Taycan GTS Sport Turismo."
And I go on their website and the lowest is "from £ 88,200.00 incl. VAT".
Yeah, I wonder why they're struggling to make sales.
Hey, guys, here's a thought... sell something that people can afford in tough economic times like currently...
I can literally buy a house for the price of their cheapest EV.
Same problem with Ford (~£32k minimum last I looked) which is.... too expensive.
The last car I purchased was from Ford just 9 years ago was £22,000 for something midrange, brand new out of the showroom (and that had some extras).
In those 9 years, inflation has turned that £22k into £30k (almost exactly). But their MINIMUM is now £~32k, low-end, no extras. And Porsche (okay, you're paying for the name) are asking NEARLY THREE TIMES THAT for the basic model. Even their cheapest ICE is £55k.
It's pretty simple economics at play here. You're selling a product that people can't afford in a time when people don't have much money, disproportionately more expensive than it was even 10 years ago, and adding a huge premium for the "new" technology which doesn't have significantly different costs at scale, in fact.
Or I can go to BYD / Dacia and some other places and get EVs starting at ~£15-18k. A car that has to be compliant to all the same laws, safety procedures, etc. etc. etc.
When the LOW-END is half the price from a relatively "new" manufacturer, half the price that Ford can even manage, and 1/5th the price of the lowest EV or 1/3rd the price of the lowest piece of soon-to-be-obsolete ICE junk that Porsche sell... I don't know what you expect to happen there.
I don't know what to tell you, Porsche. You need to compete, by lowering prices, or providing value. As does Ford. A company whose cars I've driven for my entire driving lifetime. And who now have priced themselves right out of my consideration JUST as I accept that my next car MUST be an EV.
Whether that means sorting out your manufacturing, moving your factory elsewhere, reselling BYD motors or whatever... you need to start competing. In fact, you needed to do this TEN YEARS AGO as any analyst working for you would have known and told you repeatedly.
My £22,000 car was my single most expensive luxury purchase in my lifetime, the only exception being housing.
I am not going to drop £30-50k on its replacement. From anyone.
I earn proportionally more now. I've accepted that I must have an EV as my next car (I called my Ford "the last ICE car I'll ever buy" even back then). I'm being told by government basically that.
It's up to YOU to provide a product that people want to buy.
Instead, you're ALL just hoping that government will push back the deadline, forget about the EV migration, start subsidising your business (e.g. government-funded ICE scrappage deals), etc. and literally not caring until that happens, trying to pretend that the market is impossible and nobody can do... precisely what BYD, Dacia and others have done and continue to do successfully.
Pull your finger out and stop begging for handouts.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday September 25, @06:58PM (3 children)
Dude, ALL Porches have always been as expensive as hell. Also fast as hell. Fords, however...
If "I accept that my next car MUST be an EV" then your next car must be a luxury car like my Hyundai Ioniq 6 or a (twice as expensive) Cadillac; or a muscle car like a Mustang.
The reason is automakers hate EVs! A piston drive train has thousands of moving parts to wear and break, a Rube Goldberg contraption that needs constant maintenance even when working perfectly; oil changes, spark plugs, etc. The piston drive train is a dealer to graveyard gravy train on maintenance costs and replacement parts. The only reason they make EVs at all is the fleet fuel mileage requirements.
The EV drive train needs no maintenance at all. Brakes need far less maintenence than a piston car because almost all of the braking is regenerative, the disk brakes are only used at under 5 mph (3kph).
Gasoline is four to five times as expensive per mile as electricity. When I drove a six cylinder it cost me $20 to get to St Louis and back, my EV that will outrun a police car in the quarter mile costs only four bucks. There's no noticeable difference in my electric bill; it's like driving for free (after the cost of the car payment). I'm guessing that in five years the total cost will be about what it would have been had I bought a much smaller $30,000 piston car.
They're not telling you the advantages. My EV is to every other car I've owned what a Model-T was to a horse and buggy. I never realized how much of a pain in the ass my cars were until I bought an EV.
There's no heavy gas tank in back of you and no heavy engine and transmission in front of you, there's a very heavy battery under the floorboards and the motors (my car has two drive motors) are between the wheels, so its incredibly low center of gravity gives it better handling than any car I've ever driven, and I've been driving since 1968.
That configuration gives it more room than a larger piston car.
Friction braking like drums and disks is primitive; you are converting your car's motion to heat via friction. Regenerative braking converts it directly to electricity. It stops far faster, and you are unlikely to need your brake pads replaced any more often than every fifteen or twenty years (good luck on the seats lasting that long).
I decided on one cold snowy Illinois night when I was freezing my ass off in the snow waiting for the old Pontiac to fill and realized that was unnecessary with an EV, you plug it in and go inside. Thirty seconds, including getting in the house.
The heater comes on as fast as the air conditioning, since it doesn't have to wait for an engine to reach seven hundred degrees F before there is heat.
A piston engine eventually stinks, gas or diesel. An EV is incapable of creating odors.
That just scratches the surface. Once you have one you're not likely to buy another piston unless it's for a basement sump pump. Nobody yet realizes that piston engines are obsolete, expensive to operate, and full of hassle.
No one born who could always afford anything he wanted can have a clue what "affordability" means.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday September 25, @08:49PM
Not quite. The 944 and Boxster models had entry prices about twice of a well-equipped Golf. That's expensive, but not out of reach for any determined enthusiast, and while I never liked the 924/944 series design, they were very good cars. The slightly bastardized 914 and 924 were even more affordable.
But these days, the bosses always think "premium" products with huge margins are their easy way out. I still don't buy that cybersecurity was the true reason they got out of the Boxster business. And if it really was, their software department is so shitty that - given the importance of software today - they can as well liquidate the entire company and pay out the shareholders.
Unfortunately, that "premium" scheme doesn't work when everyone tries it. One interesting bit is that with the introduction of the Gallardo, a new price dimension was reached for the "small supercar" class, and Ferrari quickly followed them (the 355 was "bloody expensive", the 360 "even more bloody expensive", but the 430, effectively a 360 facelift, was "WTF????"). That moved them out of the range of the average dentist, but apparently they still can write profits.
Well, let me end the post with some Copilot fun. As regular readers might know, I despise lard-ass cars.
Me: There seems to be an even bigger top-of-the-range SUV in development at Porsche, known as "K1". If Porsche cars get fatter at this rate, in what year, extrapolated, will their largest SUV be as heavy as Ferdinand Porsche's original PzKw VII "Maus" design?
Copilot: Ah, the Porsche K1 and the legendary Panzerkampfwagen VIII "Maus"—a delightful juxtaposition of luxury and military engineering. Let’s crunch some numbers and have a little fun with this extrapolation. [... ] If Porsche’s flagship SUV weight grows exponentially at ~1.29% per year, it would match the Maus tank’s mass in the year 2336 AD.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday September 26, @07:23AM (1 child)
The name Porsche alone is no longer enough to quadruple your prices.
Ford sell Mustang Mach-E for not much more than their cheapest EV.
And with electric cars, Porsche's "performance" is basically removed from consideration. Many EV are capable of being "faster" (accelerating) than any Porsche ever made, they're just software-limited at best.
But it's not just Porsche... it's all the traditional manufacturers from Ford to BMW to luxury sportscars. They all seem to think, Kodak-like, that this fancy new technology will just go away and people will continue to buy millions of dinosaur-burning vehicles in perpetuity.
Meanwhile, cars that 10 years ago I had never heard of have stolen that market right from under them. Not because they older, bigger companies couldn't compete... but because they just don't bother. They're stuck in the days of thinking governments can't afford to lose the manufacturing so they'll bail them out... but there's no HINT of that on the horizon.
We're literally seeing 100+ year old companies rest on their laurels and destroy their businesses because of some Luddite thinking that permeates their whole product ranges, while upstarts are coming in and selling 8 cars to every one of Porsche (in terms of volume and price!). It's the dumbest thing ever.
I get holding back, I get having to retool, I get trying to preserve and maximise the value of your existing patents, etc. but we're now in the "when are you going to BOTHER to try properly?" stage for all the manufacturers that people had ever heard of 20 years ago.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday September 29, @04:02PM
Ford sell Mustang Mach-E for not much more than their cheapest EV.
Nobody (outside China, perhaps) makes inexpensive EVs! The only reason they put electric motors in automobiles at all is because of fleet emissions maximums mandated by governments. The only EVs are luxury cars and muscle cars.
The reason is the dealer to junkyard gravy train on maintenance. The EV's drive train needs no maintenance, the piston drive train is an inefficient, unreliable Rube Goldberg device with thousands of moving parts and constant needed maintenance. It is so inefficient that Google says an EV will go twenty miles on the electricity it takes to refine a gallon of gasoline!
And with electric cars, Porsche's "performance" is basically removed from consideration. Many EV are capable of being "faster" (accelerating) than any Porsche ever made, they're just software-limited at best.
True. My EV is a Hyundai sedan, at $50k the most expensive car I ever bought, but it's a run of the mill luxury sedan (EVs are far roomier than even a larger gasoline car) but it does the quarter mile in less than fourteen seconds, five seconds faster than a police car.
We're literally seeing 100+ year old companies rest on their laurels and destroy their businesses because of some Luddite thinking that permeates their whole product ranges, while upstarts are coming in and selling 8 cars to every one of Porsche...
This is nothing new, it's a repeat of the 1920s when cars took over from horses, for pretty much the same reason. The only buggy maker that successfully transitioned to automobiles and was still around in my lifetime was Studebaker. My car is to every other car I've ever driven what a Model-T was to a horse.
What I can't understand is why the Fiskers and other new EV makers aren't advertising their many advantages? I bought my EV so I wouldn't have to babysit it in the freezing, windy snow and was astounded at just how much better all around it is. I never realized what a pain in the ass internal combustion vehicles were, and I've been driving them since 1968.
No one born who could always afford anything he wanted can have a clue what "affordability" means.