Porsche to deploy a network of 500 EV charging stations in North America in time for Mission E next year

Porsche’s North America Chief has confirmed that the German automaker is planning to deploy a network of 500 electric vehicle charging stations in North America just in time for the Mission E next year.

Klaus Zellmer, CEO of Porsche Cars North America, confirmed the details to Automotive News today.

He said that 500 stations will be installed in the US at their dealerships (189 of them) and the rest will cover highways around the country.

An additional 20 stations are planned in Canada.

Zellmer confirmed that the process has already started and that a third-party vendor has been visiting the sites and dealerships in order to prepare for the deployment, which they aim to be completed by the second half of 2019 – just when Porsche is expected to start producing the Mission E, its first all-electric vehicle.

The CEO added about the cost of the project:

it’s not a minor cost. It certainly is six-digit numbers that our dealers will have to take.

The station would be used to enable long-distance travel, but the CEO also added that they are considering a network of chargers for destinations, similar to Tesla’s Destination Charging network.

Electrek’s Take

We already had a pretty good idea of what to expect since Porsche deployed their new 800-volt fast-charging technology at their North American headquarters in Atlanta last year.

But it’s still very good news for EV infrastructure because the extent of their plans for their own network wasn’t exactly clear due to comments indicating that they might instead simply rely on the Ionity charging network in Europe and Volkswagen’s Electrify America network in the US.

Now it’s clear that they want their own network to support the Mission E and their future all-electric vehicles.

As we previously reported, Porsche claims the Mission E is capable of supporting a 350 kW charging rate, which could charge up the Mission E’s battery pack to 80% in about 15 minutes.

Now, they want to have stations that will be able to charge at that rate in order to support the vehicle.

We reported on them building the first of those stations in Germany. They claimed that the backend supports 350 kW charge rate, but it can currently charge at 50 to 150 kW. They had to develop a new transformer in order to support the charge points.

An automaker-owned network can be quite useful for drivers as demonstrated by Tesla’s very successful Supercharger network.

But interestingly, Porsche previously said they were working for the ultra fast-charging infrastructure to also work with Tesla and other EVs.

For those reasons, it will be interesting to follow the development of the network over the next year.