Porsche to release fully electric Macan SUV in 2022

Porsche wants to offer its Macan SUV with a fully electric drive. After a lot of rumours, the electric Macan has received production approval through the Board and Porsche CFO Lutz Meschke has now said that the electric Macan should be out by 2022.

++ Kindly find an update of this article below. ++

With reference to insider sources, the German news magazine Spiegel reported that the fully electric Macan had received the go-ahead by the Porsche board already, thus confirming our previous reports. According to Spiegel, Porsche claims that modern battery technology should make it possible for the electric SUV to offer the same range as today’s combustion engines.

While the Porsche Macan will also be offered as a variant with an enhanced combustion engine over a transitional period, in the long term, Porsche wants to concentrate on electric mobility. CFO Meschke explained that as a relatively small company, Porsche “will not be able to afford to offer a combustion-engine version in addition to pure-electric models in the long term”. He added that there will be “an overlap of two to three years” when the ICE models would still be supported because not all regions would be able to make the switch immediately.

Meschke said that Porsche plans to switch to full-electric powertrains in its sedans and SUVs over the next ten years. What seems certain is that the Macan will be built on the future PPE (Premium Platform Electric) electric construction kit from Audi and Porsche. However, as we recently reported, engineers have to make improvements to the PPE kit because Tesla’s Model 3 had become better than they thought. These challenges are likely to postpone the launch of the first electric models of both brands on a PPE basis by about half a year to spring 2022, which would be in line with the date mentioned above.

As we reported, Porsche’s first electric model, the Taycan, brought in so many orders, that the carmaker is having to make 40,000 units, instead of 20,000 as initially planned. The new electric vehicles are part of an ambitious strategy as by 2025 at least half of all Porsches sold should have an electric drive.

The all-electric Porsche Macan will be built in Leipzig and is set to launch in 2022.

Update 26 February 2019: Porsche has now officially confirmed the rumours about an electric Macan. The company’s Supervisory Board has decided to manufacture the next generation of the Macan in Leipzig as a fully electric series from “the beginning of the next decade”. The compact SUV will be based on the PPE architecture (Premium Platform Electric) developed in cooperation with Audi and, like the Taycan, will feature 800 Volt technology.

spiegel.de (original source, in German), europe.autonews.com, porsche.com (update)