EVs news brief: Porsche to launch first battery-only model in 2019; Ifo reports job losses on German ICE ban

Porsche EVs sales could reach 25 per cent of total sales by 2025

Porsche says it will spend one billion euros to overhaul its main Stuttgart plant where it will build its first battery-only model, the Mission E saloon.

The car is expected to be available in 2019.

The company sees a switch in markets in very large cities in Asia as they bring in legislation to clear the air.

“We expect the metropolises in China and Asia will switch to pure electric mobility very fast,” Oliver Blume, Porsche CEO told Reuters. “I believe there will be few pure combustion engines to be seen in the large cities there in five years time. The development in rural areas will, however, proceed much more slowly.”

Battery-only vehicles could make up 25 per cent of the German automakers total sales by 2025, give or take 5 to 10 percentage points, according to Blume.

He says Porsche and Audi are looking for significant savings in development and material costs for their EV programs by sharing a new production platform code.

Both brands are expected to save money by sharing components and modules and Blume says “Further platforms are conceivable, for instance with SUVs.”

Porsche is counting on the demand for high-end EVs to grow.  The company may create another zero-emission model off the Mission E platform and says an electrified version of the top-selling Macan SUV is possible.

Earlier in July, Volvo said all its cars launched after 2019 would be either fully electric or hybrids.  With the announcement, the Swedish automaker became the first carmaker to set a date for the phase out of ICE vehicles.

Ifo economic institute on job losses with German switch to EVs

The Ifo economic institute says over 600,000 jobs may be at risk should Germany follow through with its plan to ban combustion engines by 2030.

A study by the institute says the shift to zero-emissions cars would threaten 426,000 car manufacturing jobs and the remainder of the losses would be in related industries, such as suppliers.

According to the study which was commissioned by the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA), 13 per cent of industrial value creation in Germany currently depends on combustion technology.

German manufacturers and suppliers hold one in three of every patent in the field of electromobility (34 per cent) and hybrid drive systems (32 per cent). These figures refer to the period from 2010 to 2015.

The study says one of the arguments made in favour of a ban on combustion engines is that the German automotive industry was too late and too tentative in embracing alternative engines, and ceded the technical leadership it has on combustion engines.

President of the Ifo, Clemens Fuest, disagrees, saying “A ban on combustion engines simply cannot be justified by citing a lack of innovation on the part of the German automotive industry. Measures that accelerate the market penetration of innovative products are far more expedient than bans.”

Matthias Wissmann, President of the German Association of the Automotive Industry said “A highly efficient combustor, perhaps based on renewable fuels in the future, and electro vehicles are not contradictory concepts, they are complementary paths.”

He added “As the home of the automotive industry, Germany should not favour one type of drive system over another. That just wouldn’t make any sense economically, ecologically or socially.”