You can’t really blame car companies for having shifted their investments in the direction of electric vehicles (EV), given the ever-tightening emissions rules and the European Union’s plan to ban internal combustion vehicles from 2035.
But with global EV sales growing at a slower rate than expected, many have been forced to reconsider their strategies.
Porsche currently finds itself in this situation, with the German sports car maker announcing on Thursday that it plans to cut 1,900 jobs due to weak demand for EVs and sluggish sales in China, according to AFP.
The cuts will reportedly take place through natural attrition rather than forced redundancy, and will affect the company’s Stuttgart headquarters in Germany as well as its nearby research centre.
This comes a week after news broke that Porsche plans to produce more models with combustion engines and plug-in hybrid powertrains, requiring additional investment over and above what it has already spent on developing battery electric vehicles.
The move is expected to add around 800 million euro (R15.3 billion) to Porsche AG’s expenses for the 2025 financial year alone.
This shift in focus doesn’t mean that Porsche is dropping any of its current electric vehicle models or cancelling existing EV plans for that matter. Rather it will focus on creating hybrid versions of models that were previously slated to go electric only.
This could, for instance, mean that the new Macan EV gets an ICE counterpart, but given that its PPE platform was designed for battery vehicles only, it remains to be seen whether the company would build the hybrid model on a separate platform or engineer a comprehensive adaptation of the aforementioned EV architecture.
Previously, Porsche said it intends for EVs to account for 80% of its sales by 2030, but that is looking extremely unlikely as things stand today.
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