Porsche announces that it is doubling its electric vehicle investment to ‘more than six billion euro’

With all the excitement around the Mission E, Porsche’s first all-electric vehicle, the German automaker announced that it is doubling its electric vehicle investment to ‘more than six billion euro’ in order to release variants based on the vehicle.

Oliver Blume, Chairman of the Executive Board of Porsche AG, made the announcement today:

“We are doubling our expenditure on electromobility from around three billion euro to more than six billion euro. Alongside development of our models with combustion engines, we are setting an important course for the future with this decision.”

The 3 additional billion will be split like this:

• 500 million euro will be used for the development of Mission E variants and derivatives
• around one billion euro for electrification and hybridisation of the existing product range
• several hundred million for the expansion of sites
• plus around 700 million euro in new technologies, charging infrastructure and smart mobility.

Porsche has been teasing the possibility to develop variants and derivatives of the Mission for a while now, but today is the first time that they’ve announced a significant investment to make it happen.

In the past, there have been rumors about Lamborghini building an all-electric supercar on a Porsche Mission E platform.

When it comes the investment in charging infrastructure, Porsche referenced Ionity, the ‘ultra-fast’ joint electric car charging network by BMW, Mercedes, Ford and Volkswagen, which is now starting to take shape in Europe.

They also talked about the Porsche dealer network becoming part of a nationwide rapid charging infrastructure.

The company’s whole electric vehicle rollout is expected to start in a significant way next year when the Mission E hits the market.

As we reported last week, Porsche says that it already has all-electric Mission E production prototypes and the production line is going up this year for volume production in 2019.

Electrek’s Take

I said it before, but I’m going to say it again: Porsche is extremely serious about electric vehicles.

The fact that they plan a production rate of 20,000 cars per year for the Mission E is a fairly good indication. While it doesn’t appear to be that many cars, it is significant for an automaker producing 200,000 to 250,000 cars per year.

Furthermore, Porsche plans for 50% of its production to be electric within 6 years, which is more aggressive than any other major automaker. It’s still not enough in my opinion, but they get points for being more ambitious.

Finally, they are aware of that they need to take charging infrastructure seriously and the fact that they are starting out with an 800-volt system appears to be pushing the industry forward.