Audi and Porsche talk about their new billion-dollar joint electric car platform

In order to take on Tesla in the all-electric luxury segment, Audi and Porsche decided to join forces last year and build a new electric vehicle platform from the ground up together.

Now the CEOs of each company discuss their work on the new platform in an interview.

In their first interview together, Porsche CEO Oliver Blume and Audi CEO Rupert Stadler talked to Stuttgarter-Zeitung (translated from German) about the structure of the cooperation.

Blume said:

“We have founded two project houses, one of them at the Audi headquarters in Ingolstadt. The second in Weissach, where Porsche has its development center. Audi currently has about 550 developers, Porsche 300. We have introduced two occupancy days per week. Otherwise, the teams work together via video conferencing and Skype. We have distributed the responsibility so that every brand has the vehicle modules that best suits them.”

Stadler added that both companies expect to spend a low single-digit billion amount in the project by 2025 – 30% less than if they would have both developed their own electric platforms.

They both discussed the fact that each company is separately coming out with their own first all-electric vehicles on different platforms, the Porsche Mission E and the Audi e-tron quattro.

Those cars are very different which could create an issue with the new platform since Audi might want to do an electric sports car next while Porsche could want to start working on an SUV, but the executives say that the new platform will support anything from a sports car to a SUV.

Stadler said that Audi would like to revisit making an all-electric sports car, but they are also working on two sedans and two SUVs.

You might remember that Audi actually built an all-electric supercar years ago, the all-electric e-tron supercar, which was basically a battery-powered version of the Audi R8, but the vehicle failed to get any traction with its ridiculous $1 million price tag.

After those little interesting insights into Audi and Porsche’s new platform, the interview quickly turned into an advertisement against the proposed driving bans on diesel cars to help reduce air pollution in Germany. You can access the full interview here.