‘I’m sure people will be convinced when they drive one’
BB:
‘You’ve designed the PPE platform purely for electric cars, but did you consider a solution to accommodate both combustion and EV?’
SL:
‘No, our strategy is to move our volume models to an electric architecture, so that 80 per cent of our deliveries are EVs by 2030 – a small company like Porsche cannot achieve this goal by going both ways.’
BB:
‘|sn’t it a compromise to develop PPE with Audi?’
SL:
‘Developing with a partner has economic benefits but then other aspects come into play because the platform has to work for two companies with quite dierent targets, but we are confident PPE meets all expectations for a Porsche driving experience.’
BB:
‘Presumably focusing purely on a full EV platform gives you more engineering freedom too…’
SL:
‘Kind of. When we started we thought we had the space but actually it is pretty packed under there – but because you have fewer mechanical connections with an EV, you have more freedom on where to place things.’
BB:
‘You’ve chosen to keep the existing Macan on sale in parallel for a while yet. How long?’
SL:
‘The MLB architecture is very old now [the Macan debuted in 2014], so | think it will be maybe two or three more years maximum.
‘Of course | say this as a Porsche employee, but if you have driven the new model, even the base model, you forget about internal combustion – the dynamics, the performance, the silence, it’s a new world.’
BB:
‘But it’s other issues, isn’t it, like range, like charging…’
SL:
‘Yes, but the range is even better than the Taycan at up to 383 miles and charging, of course, that’s an issue, but that will improve, it has to – politics wants it to and we are following that path in a Porsche way. One of the things we have to do is get customers to drive this car – once they do |’m sure they’ll be convinced.’