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Porsche Unveils Its First Electric Car
An anonymous reader writes: German automaker Porsche has made its first foray into electric vehicles. On Monday at the Frankfurt Auto Show, it unveiled a concept car called the Porsche Mission E. Its 800-volt drive system can take the car from 0 to 100km/h in 3.5 seconds. The high-voltage charging system lets it gain 80% of its battery capacity back within 15 minutes. They claim a driving range of 500km on a single battery charge. Porsche said the car was not a response to the Tesla Model S, but the two will likely be direct competitors when the Mission E goes into full production. That will happen "within the next five years."
This is NOT their first electric car by a long shot
http://www.history.com/news/fe...
Assuming it launches for a similar price range, it can't compete with a Model S now, much less in the next five years. Next year the supercharger network will blanket the US and they'll have two attractive (/expensive) models to choose from. In 2018 they'll have a $35k everyman's car to compete with the LEAF and Volt. How is Porsche going to compete? If this came out a year ago maybe it could rely on it's brand but Tesla is quickly becoming the Apple of cars (not entirely a good thing). Talk about dead on arrival.
A number of people (myself included) have known for decades (and somtimes brought to the attention of auto company executives that electric cars could be capable of performance far better than fuel-driven engines and limited only by the traction of the tires, and that people might want lectric vehicles with sane levels of performance.
But the auto execs only thought of electric vehicles as appealing to eco-freaks, who would be willing to accept - and might desire - classic VW levels of performance. So when they designed electric "concept cars" they didn't do the engineering to achieve performance. Their offerings were traffic-snarling, short-range, wimpy eco-freak commuter cars.
This left the market SO open that Elon Musk (who also understood the demand) was able to build a successful new auto company from scratch (a couple billion dollars worth) and capture the market.
Musk started with the high end - to recover the development cost from the early adopters willing to pay big for the new toy - in classic Silicon Valley style. He's working his way down from the pricey prestige cars to the bulk market as fast as his engineers can bring the cost down and his financing can build the manufacturing infrastructure (and his lawyers and lobbyists can remove the legal obstacles to his not-dealer-dependent marketing).
But now the PARTIAL lesson - that there's a market at the top for a high-performance electric car - has been learned, and a prestige auto maker is trying to get a slice of that.
They're STILL not seeing the whole picture. Which is very good for Tesla. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Which is pretty sweet, and exactly what Tesla wants.
Tesla wants the competition in the market. They won't be able to put enough money together to make electric cars into the "new normal" by themselves. For that, they need a lot of competitors who are producing enough volume to make EVs something that you see everywhere.
Once it hits a certain tipping point, the market will start supporting EVs as more than just toys. At that point, the goal of mass adoption could turn EVs into a replacement for gasoline vehicles which means that now Tesla makes more money due to increased volume over all. And being the owner of a great deal of production capacity for these sorts of vehicles, this means they have a head start on everyone else.
It won't be enough to make Tesla completely dominant in the EV market, but it could propel them into a top spot in a New Electric Vehicle Order. More to the point, it would turn them into a real honest to goodness car company, and not just an expensive vanity project.
Or to put it more succinctly, a rising tide lifts all ships. Any work that anyone does to support EVs or dedicate production capacity to EVs will help Tesla out too. Just like they're helping out everyone else by releasing their patents and building infrastructure.