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Porsche says Tesla owners are the top Taycan reservation holders

We are still about a year away from Porsche starting the production of the Taycan, its first all-electric vehicle, but the company is already seeing some strong demand.

The German automaker claims that they have a year worth of pre-orders and Tesla owners are the top Taycan reservation holders.

Klaus Zellmer, the head of Porsche North America, made the comment during an interview with Cnet.

Without confirming an actual number, Zellmer said:

“If all the people [who preordered] buy this car, then we are sold out for the first year.”

Previously, Porsche was reportedly planning to produce about 20,000 Taycan vehicles per year.

The company recently said that it might increase planned production of the Taycan all-electric vehicle as demand soared.

The bulk of the demand is actually not coming from Porsche owners.

Zellmer said that more than half of the reservation holders are new to Porsche and the top brand they are coming from is Tesla:

“More than half of the people that are signing up for the Taycan have not owned or do not own a Porsche. Typically, if we look at our source of business, people coming from other brands, it’s Audi, BMW, or Mercedes. The no. 1 brand now is Tesla. That’s pretty interesting, to see that people that were curious about the Tesla for very good reasons obviously don’t stop being curious.”

Recently, Zellmer said that what Tesla did is ‘truly astonishing’.

The German premium automaker has had a weird relationship with Tesla as it moves its own first all-electric vehicle program forward.

Earlier this year, Porsche said that ‘Tesla is not a benchmark for them’ in the development of the Taycan, but the company was spotted benchmarking Taycan test mules with a Tesla Model S P85D.

Porsche CEO Oliver Blume also admitted that Tesla is stealing away some customers and they are clearly trying to position the Taycan against the Model S.

The company says that it aims to bring the Taycan to market by the end of 2019.

Featured Image: Porsche Taycan spotted being benchmarked against older Tesla Model S – by Frank Cooreman

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Avatar for Fred Lambert Fred Lambert

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