Germany's Porsche Pauses Shift to Evs as Profits Tank [video]
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Porsche has paused its shift to electric vehicles due to tanking profits, sparking debate among commenters about the viability of EVs and the company's strategy.
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By the time you factor in the increased price of the car, increased price of insurance, and increased price of tires, you'll end up in the red even if you do charge at home (and if you don't, the cost is just as much as gas if not higher), and that's not even factoring in the overall inconvenience of ownership.
I'll be going back to ice/hybrid as soon as my lease is up, and never returning to all electric. The only thing they have is faster, smoother acceleration, but I've learned that I like the dirty feel of a shifting transmission better - kind of like why beer and all it's impurities is better than the purest alcohol. There is just nothing, zero, zilch, that is better in an EV.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_918_Spyder
For me an EV has been great, but it’s not my only car. I can charge at work for free, or at home with solar. Even if I’m paying 30-60 cents/kWh, it’s way cheaper per mile than my gas cars.
Maintenance… there’s none. Just consumables like washer fluid, tires, wipers.
But that said you need to be able to charge at home, and your range needs to be right sized to your commute/lifestyle. When correct it’s better than a gas cars- it’s always full and ready to go. If the range is wrong or you can’t conveniently charge it, it is a chore.
Personally an automatic transmission does nothing for me, I’ll take the unrelenting acceleration of the EV over that any day. But a 6spd is more fun!
What car did you buy and what would you pick now?
I've had the opposite, EV had a cheaper price, more horespower, nicer interior, better acceleration, cheap insurance, tires are mostly the same prices (bought winter tires recently)
On top of that...
- no more getting ripped off at garages with ice maintenance
- gas would be 3-4x what i would pay in electricity if i didnt have solar panels.
- no worries having catalitic converter stolen...
- no more polluting the neighborhood (main reason initially)
I would find it impossible to justify going back to ice.
> There is just nothing, zero, zilch, that is better in an EV.
You dont kill your kids with the exhaust.
But you do have good points. The main thing is the cost has to come down. And china has a lead in that respect.
I have home solar, so my "gas" is free, although I have 300kw of Electrify America charging that came with my lease.
I've driven an ID4 since 2021 and won't be going back to ICE.
I think EVs can be excellent fits for many commmuting patterns, and certainly for people who learned driving manual transmissions and who have had high performing cars.
To the parent comment's point, it's sort of personal preference.
But, I've been in a Model 3 Performance and a Taycan 4S and experienced the ~3s electric 0-60, and... it's just ghostly, linear motion, nothing like the feeling of the non-linear jerk and jolt-punctuated ride you get with a powerful ICE and manual transmission.
The M3P in particular was so shockingly video game-like it almost felt dangerous, as though I didn't really realise just how fast I was going until it was too fast.
But I do agree that personal electric transportation should be able to travel at >15mph on suitable cycle tracks, seeing as it ain’t that hard for pedal bikes to do those speeds.
Your "typical" performance car customer wants a monster noise from the engine. A visceral sound. If it sounds like a jet fighter taking off, even better. There's no "authentic" sound to replace it.
Music to the ears (Grand Prix 1966) -> https://youtu.be/5RILdsjeL_4
Porsche's mistake lies in forcing all of their other customers, worldwide, to accept products designed to satisfy EU regulators. Lowest-common-denominator engineering has never been why people buy Porsches, but these days the engineers at Porsche take a bus to work, where they report to people who were chauffeured there.
Porsche can not afford to keep ICE development afloat just for the US market and a few others. There is no economic case for keeping ICE Porsches around when they can capture only a very small amount of the market. It is also preposterous to have engineers build cars in such an environment.
Meanwhile, there are other companies that don't seem to be voluntarily adopting similar constraints. The age of the "World Car" is over, and Porsche's only chance is for their management to confront that reality.
This is not about management not knowing, it is about the realities of Porsche as a company. Going back to ICE, just to habe Cars American consumers may want more, is not an option.
Oddly, steam had some very interesting properties too, but for motor vehicles was ultimately let down by practicality and possibly power-to-weight ratio if I recall correctly.
ICE of course was always about convenience and a lot of energy in a small tank. As batteries improve, this advantage is being worn down.
Meanwhile, in trains, "hybrid" (diesel-electric) and electric are the two main types left. There's simply a lot to be said for 100% torque at 0 RPM.
I think the Boxster EV is supposed to be released next year, so maybe you won't have too long to wait for that. In the meantime, you can simulate the experience by loading 500 pounds of rocks into your frunk and 500 more pounds into the trunk. I'm a lot more bearish about the EV Cayman/Boxster than I am about the Macan EV.
Maybe they need to come with a new (as in a _designed_ car) model.
The profit collapse is more a matter of accounting write downs for their R&D
Make no mistake, they still have issues because sales are collapsing in China (and much of that pressure is from EV upstarts), and there's been a pushback in US on EVs in part due to political shifts.
So we'll continue to se EV, ICE and hybrid development from Porsche, just at a different mix. But it's not going to be easy for them regardless. They have a precarious place in the upmarket mix where a lot of competition is coming for the intro luxury segment, and the volume in the exotic segment is too low to really sustain operations at Porsche's scale.
Still in a better spot than, say, an Astin Martin which would have been better off financially last couple of years just giving customers cash instead of letting them buy cars and lose money on every one