Porsche in crisis: How the sports car manufacturer is looking for a way out of the electric trap

It is said that the sentence comes from Ferry Porsche: “We build cars that no one needs, but everyone wants,” the legendary former boss of the sports car manufacturer is said to have once said. Designing a car that no one needs can actually not be that difficult. But things get tricky with the second part of the sentence. And in the end, this will be exactly the big challenge that will decide the fate of the badly crumpled Swabian sports car manufacturer in the coming years.

What does it look like, the Porsche that everyone wants? Michael Leiters has to give the answer to this. Since the beginning of the year, the Essen native has been the new hope at the top of the company. On Wednesday, at a capital market day, he will present his plan for how he wants to lead the company out of the crisis. It is by far the most important appointment for Leiters at Porsche so far. Leiters invited the investors to the Porsche development center in Weissach near Stuttgart.

In the first nine months of his term in office, Porsche was primarily concerned with cost savings. A total of around 9,000 jobs are expected to be eliminated by 2035, one in five jobs in the company. And not only stock analysts but also company insiders doubt whether this will be enough given the continued decline in sales figures. But saving is not yet a business model. This requires the superfluous dream cars conjured up by Ferry Porsche. Leiters wants to present one of them on Wednesday in Weissach.

The design study of a new Porsche super sports car should be an eye-catcher at the Capital Markets Day. The car is a kind of high-end version of the Porsche classic 911. There is talk of a price of around half a million euros if it is built in small series in a few years.

The Super Porsche is an example of the new course on which Leiters wants to get the company out of the crisis: fewer units and more exclusivity with correspondingly higher profit margins.

But the most important message is hidden beneath the body of the show car. It will not have an electric drive like the futuristic Mission The study that Porsche will show in Weissach apparently has a brand-typical six-cylinder boxer engine on board. There is also speculation about an eight-cylinder engine.

This means that the Swabian sports car manufacturer is essentially back from the future. The long-time company boss Blume is betting that large numbers of Porsche customers will switch to electric cars within a few years. Blume summed it up in a nutshell: If children imitate a car in the future, they will no longer make “buzz-buzz” like a combustion engine, but “zzzuum” like an electric car, he predicted.

The only problem is: Children don't buy cars, and many of today's Porsche customers have no desire for electric cars. Sales of the Taycan sports sedan, the first E-Porsche introduced six years ago, have collapsed. Production could stop at the end of the decade. The SUV model Macan, one of the most important Porsche models, is only available as an electric car in Europe, and that is selling poorly.

Blume had already corrected the electric course before he left as Porsche boss, and the manufacturer is now investing a lot of money in new combustion engine models. However, plans to build Porsche's own factory for high-performance batteries were abandoned. Since stepping down from the top position at Porsche at the end of 2025, Blume has been concentrating on his job as CEO of Volkswagen, the majority owner of the sports car maker.

Porsche will also bring new electric cars onto the market under the leadership of Leiters. The entry-level Boxster and Cayman models, which are currently no longer being built, are returning with electric drive. They were already fully developed when Leiters came to Zuffenhausen in January.

Nevertheless, the Porsche boss sounds skeptical when he talks about electric sports cars. He considers it a challenge. It starts with engine performance and acceleration. In the combustion engine world, Porsche models like the 911 drove away from other cars simply because of their powerful engines. But in electromobility, even some family cars from volume manufacturers such as BYD and Kia have 500 hp and huge torque values. Performance and acceleration alone are no longer a differentiating factor for sports cars.

There are also other problems. The heavy battery in the vehicle floor increases the vehicle weight, which is a handicap for sporty driving. Many sports car fans also miss the sound of high-performance combustion engines in quiet electric cars. And they don't have the ability to reach for the gear lever when driving, because the electric drive doesn't have a multi-stage switchable gearbox.

That's why electromobility is a threat to sports car manufacturers like Porsche. So far, their products have been polarizing: some despise them as silly status symbols for aging men. Horsepower enthusiasts are enthusiastic about their technology and their shapes. In the age of electric cars, however, things could get much worse for sports car manufacturers: their cars might just be boring.

But what does an electric sports car that customers really want look like? Investors on the stock market have this question in mind. “Strategically speaking, this is a huge problem for all manufacturers,” says Ingo Speich, head of sustainability and governance at the investment company Deka. No sports car manufacturer has yet found a truly satisfactory answer, he says.

When Ferrari introduced its long-announced first electric model, the Luce (Italian for light), this spring, the disappointment was measurable: the Ferrari share price fell by more than five percent. Lamborghini, in turn, has scrapped the planned all-electric Lanzador sports car. The English sports car manufacturer McLaren, Leiters' employer before he moved to Porsche, has not yet seen any interest in electric cars among its customers.

Others are currently feeling their way into the difficult new terrain. The Mercedes sports brand AMG presented its first fully electric sports car in the spring with the GT model, which has almost 1200 hp. Audi also wants to try its luck with a new electric sports car in 2027.

Are customers waiting for cars like this? No, believes Hamburg sports car dealer Benjamin David, who deals in expensive cars from various luxury brands. “Electric cars are great for getting from A to B easily, but that’s not what sports cars are about,” says David. His customers wanted to have fun behind the wheel; many of them found electric cars boring.

The dealer reports on the workshop “events” that he organizes for his well-heeled clients. At weekend seminars, lawyers, notaries and doctors have mechanics explain how to maintain a V8 engine or a Porsche boxer engine. “Some people even want to change the oil on their Porsche or Ferrari themselves,” says David. But with electric cars there is hardly any maintenance work and you can't do anything yourself anyway. Basically, it's like expensive mechanical watches, says David: a digital wristwatch for 50 euros can do everything better, and yet there are people who buy a Patek Philippe for many thousands of euros.

In order to win over horsepower fans to electric sports cars, manufacturers are coming up with a lot of ideas. This year, Porsche introduced an innovation called “E-Shift” for the electric Taycan. It simulates the switching processes and vehicle response of an eight-speed transmission, as customers know from combustion models. The noise of the electric drive in the Taycan is amplified in the interior using speakers so that the sound sounds more impressive.

In the electric AMG Mercedes, a sophisticated acoustic system even imitates the sonorous V8 bubbling typical of a large combustion engine. AMG also offers so-called “seat shakers”, vibration systems mounted in the seats that are intended to create a combustion engine feeling when accelerating. The curious innovation turns “performance into a whole-body experience,” promises Mercedes.

Hamburg sports car dealer David's verdict on fake engine sounds, pseudo gearshifts and shaking seats is merciless. “Nobody wants that, it’s too embarrassing,” he says. AMG boss Stefan Weckbach disagrees. “For us, it’s not about artificially copying a combustion engine,” says the car manager, who used to work for Porsche for a long time. Rather, they want to ensure that the electric car “feels more direct and coherent”. Many customers were “very positively surprised” when they test drove the electric AMG GT. He does not provide any figures on sales of the electric sports car.

If it's so difficult to get sports car fans excited about electric cars, why don't manufacturers just keep selling them combustion models? That is exactly the recipe that Porsche boss Leiters is inevitably relying on, at least in the short and medium term. The sales figures speak for themselves: the only one of the four Porsche model series that grew in the first half of the year was the classic combustion engine 911. Sales increased by 19 percent. Without the traditional model, things would be really difficult for Porsche economically.

The Taycan electric model and the electric version of the Macan, however, suffered double-digit declines. The Mercedes sports brand AMG is now once again developing a new V8 combustion engine. That was actually planned differently. Just a few years ago, Mercedes boss Ola Källenius also wanted to quickly convert the AMG model range to “electric only”.

And yet sports car manufacturers like Porsche and AMG have to strike a difficult balance. As indispensable as the combustion engine is in the foreseeable future, this dependence can become dangerous for you in the long term. “Porsche runs the risk of missing out on the next generation of customers,” says capital market expert Speich from Deka. He means teenagers and young adults who are growing up with Tesla, BYD and other electric brands today. For Gen Z, vehicles with combustion engines may have the “old car stigma,” warns Speich. The combustion engine threatens to become a dead end.

This is already a reality in China today, where an affluent young consumer class is almost exclusively interested in electric cars. Porsche, on the other hand, almost exclusively finds buyers for its combustion engine models in China, whose customer base is becoming ever smaller. With dramatic consequences: In the four years up to the end of 2025, Porsche sales in what was once the manufacturer's most important market have more than halved. There are further sharp declines in China this year.

Little consolation for Porsche boss Leiters: There are certainly electric sports cars that are well received by Chinese customers - and they even look like Porsche ones. Only they come from the Chinese electronics manufacturer Xiaomi, which has only been building cars for two and a half years. The Xiaomi SU7 is now one of the best-selling vehicles in China, looks very similar to the Taycan - and costs only a quarter of the Porsche list price.