The first of Porsche’s existing road cars to go all-electric will be the Macan SUV, the German sports car manufacturer announced Tuesday. The all-electric Macan will enter production sometime “early in the next decade,” the company said. The Macan is currently Porsche’s best-selling car; Porsche sold close to 90,000 of them in 2018, beating out the Cayenne SUV and the Panamera sedan.
The Macan EV will be the third all-electric car in Porsche’s lineup. Porsche is set to start making the Taycan sedan (which is the final production version of the company’s Mission E concept) at the end of 2019. A crossover version of the Taycan, called the Cross Turismo, will go into production in 2020.
Porsche didn’t announce any further details about the electric Macan, other than it will share the same 800-volt charging system being used in the Taycan and the Cross Turismo. That means customers can expect really fast charge times, with the ability to add some 250 miles of range in just about 15 minutes (at compatible Porsche charging stations, of course).
The company did say “[t]he next generation Porsche Macan will be fully electric,” implying there won’t be a hybrid or gas version available once the SUV is reimagined as an EV. That’s a potentially huge deal considering the Macan’s status as the company’s best-selling car.
Much like its parent company, the Volkswagen Group, Porsche is intently focused on adding electric propulsion technology to its cars in the coming years. The company is investing more than 6 billion euros by 2022 into the technology shift, and says half of all its vehicles could be all-electric by 2025. A number of them are already offered as hybrids.
“[O]ver the next ten years we will focus on a drive mix consisting of even further optimized petrol engines, plug-in hybrid models, and purely electrically operated sports cars,” Oliver Blume, Porsche’s chairman, said in a statement.
Rumors of an electric Macan date back to 2017, when Porsche executives publicly considered the possibility. But they heated up again this week ahead of Tuesday’s announcement. For what it’s worth, the company has been targeting 2022 for a refresh for a few years now.
This article is from The Verge
