Porsche is turning its mid-engine 718 roadster into an EV by 2025

The Porsche 718, a mid-engine roadster that injects the automaker’s motorsports’ history into a modern-day package, is going all electric by 2025.

The 718 EV, which was announced during Porsche’s annual meeting, is one piece of the company’s ambitious and recently expanded plans to electrify its fleet. The company said Friday that it now wants 80% of all new sales to be made up of all-electric vehicles by 2030.

“Because of the different speed of transformation in the different regions of the world, we have a very flexible engine strategy,” Blume said. “We are going for emotional combustion engines, powerful plug in hybrids, sporty hybrids and also for fully electric cars.” He added that some models will be offered in a variety of parallel powertrains, emphasizing that the 911 will continue to be offered as a combustion engine.

The Porsche 718 EV, which will be the third all-electric vehicle in its portfolio, follows the all-electric Taycan that debuted in 2019 and the upcoming Macan.

The new sales target can’t be achieved by the rising popularity of the Taycan and its numerous variants. An all-electric Macan and the 718 EV will help close that gap, company executives said in a briefing before the annual meeting. The company also said Friday that its plan includes building out a proprietary network of EV charging stations that will include lounge-like spots for customers to work or drink coffee while waiting for their batteries to recharge.

The Macan, as previously planned, will first launch in Europe in 2023, followed by the U.S. in 2024. The 718 EV will debut in 2025, Porsche CEO Oliver Blume said. The Macan will be based on the Premium Platform Electric (PPE) platform, an architecture that Porsche and Audi first started developing in 2018.

Porsche is developing a special configuration for the 718 EV, Blume said, adding that it will also have an 800-volt system like the Taycan that allows for some of the fast charging speeds in the industry.

That won’t be Porsche’s only challenge. Blume said that its strategy is to use many of the same components in the 718 and 911 in order to produce the two vehicles on the same production line.

“So it’s a different platform, but using same modules, like on our two-door sports car, the 911,” he added.

Porsche said it also plans to produce a hybrid variant of the iconic 911 sports car. This will not be a plug-in hybrid and will instead be sporty hybrid similar to the technology in the Porsche 919 hybrid that raced and won in Le Mans.

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/GkvAger