Porsche is reportedly building its flagship battery-electric vehicle at its own plant. Originally to be manufactured by Volkswagen Group’s van division in Hannover, Germany alongside sister vehicles from Audi and Bentley, the sports car brand backed out of the production agreement. Sources told Automotive News’ sibling publication, Automobilwoche, that Porsche executives didn’t believe their vehicle needed the autonomous functions that will be found in the cars being made for Audi and Bentley. The reason? Their buyers are mostly performance-focused consumers. As a result, Porsche lobbied Volkswagen Group to build the car at their facility instead.
That move, however, means Porsche will need to pay Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles around $113 million to buy itself out of the Project Artemis, which is being spearheaded by Audi. Instead, Porsche will build its flagship on the PPE architecture that’s set to debut on the all-electric second-generation Macan that was codeveloped with Audi. It is also reportedly underpinning the battery-electric successor to the Panamera, which is due out sometime between 2024 and 2025.
The Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles facility in Hannover was due to build 25,000 units for Porsche and was included in its financial planning to ensure job security through 2029. However, the compensation will enable Volkswagen Group’s van division to replace lost production with other models including the ID. Buzz electric minivan, which will be available in several configurations. Additionally, Hannover will become an overflow production site that will supply vehicle bodies to an Audi factory in Brussels, Belgium starting in 2026 if capacity there falls short.
Project Artemis originally had vehicles coming for Porsche, Bentley, and Audi. Spearheading the program is Audi, which was the first brand to get an electric flagship on the new Scalable Systems Platform (SSP), which will replace the existing MEB platform and the PPE architecture that will underpin the Macan EV and the Q6 e-tron plus several vehicles for Audi and Porsche. The MEB platform is currently in use on the Volkswagen ID.3 and ID.4, and the Audi Q4 e-tron family.
Volkswagen Group is investing $950 million toward new research and development facilities in Wolfsburg, Germany where the SSP architecture and its components will be made. Project Artemis will also introduce a new software stack that will enable level 4 autonomous driving and a new battery cell technology. Audi has previewed the SSP-based vehicles via a series of concepts, the first two of which are the Skysphere and Grandsphere. A third show car called the Urbansphere debuts sometime this year.
Every Volkswagen Group vehicle will be on the SSP platform by the end of the decade, as outlined during its Strategy 2030 presentation. The sedan that will be created under Volkswagen’s Project Trinity will be among the first and is reportedly going on sale in 2026. In that same year, Volkswagen Group aims to sell 40 million vehicles. Additionally, the company plans to offer the SSP platform to brands outside of the Volkswagen Group umbrella just like it’s currently doing with the MEB platform. It also aims to establish a closed-loop value chain to make production more cost-effective. By 2030, this will drop the cost of new battery cells by 50 percent while giving them a use case of 80 percent. Six gigafactories across Europe will have up to 240 GWh of capacity in 2030 for Volkswagen Group.
