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While Tesla completes a factory in Berlin, Mercedes-Benz and Audi are launching electric car deals to dominate the luxury market.
By Jack Ewing
HOCKENHEIM, Germany – The Porsche Taycan exploded so fast that my skull hit the headrest and my vision became blurry.
It was a demonstration of what can happen when German engineers apply their intelligence to electric cars and showed how German luxury car manufacturers hope to prevent Tesla from destroying the country’s largest export industry.
A year after Porsche introduced the Taycan to the market, Mercedes-Benz and Audi are about to launch their first luxury cars designed from the ground up to run on batteries, as well as being clumsy conversions of gasoline models.
These new purebred electric models will determine whether German automakers can keep their hegemony at the top of a Tesla attack, which literally invades their territory by planting a so-called Gigaphoric in a forest outside Berlin. faces Silicon Valley’s audacity head-on, with the long-term German economy at stake.
Tesla also has a lot at stake. The company’s $ 658 billion market price only makes sense if investors will one day outshine classic carmakers in terms of sales and render brands like Daimler and Volkswagen useless.
The Taycan, a four-door sedán that Porsche recently showed me at the Hockenheimring racing complex south of Heidelberg, is a first example of what German brands are capable of doing. 0 to 60 miles according to the time in less than 3 seconds.
So this happens, possibly the Tesla S. But Car and Driver tests have demonstrated Porsche’s claim that the Taycan can reproduce those explosions 10 times in a row, unlike the Tesla, which becomes slow with repeated use as the battery runs out. Porsche has discovered a form of explosive acceleration even when the battery is not fully charged.
During an hour of general driving on Porsche’s meandering track, animated by a Porsche instructor who encouraged me to poll the car limits, the Taycan stuck to the asphalt like a roadster and never showed any symptoms of fatigue. the car.
“Our plan from the beginning to make our electric vehicle a genuine Porsche,” Stefan Weckbach, Porsche’s head at the Taycan rate, told reporters this year.
This sums up quite well the technique that German luxury car manufacturers, after a backward start, adopt for electric cars. Germany is the birthplace of the gasoline car and remains a source of national pride. Your brands must demonstrate that they can adapt their knowledge. -how in the maximum performance, reliability and comfort of electric vehicles.
“We’re going to score problems with our vintage qualities,” Audi leader Markus Duesmann said in an interview.
The pandemic has increased pressure on classic car manufacturers to deliver genuine electric vehicles.
Sales of gasoline and diesel cars in Europe have fallen since the virus hit, but sales of electric cars have more than doubled, largely due to government incentives.
In November, one in 11 new electric cars was registered in Western Europe, a record, according to Matthias Schmidt, a Berlin analyst who publishes a monthly report on the electric car market.
Germans have decades of delight in creating cocoon-shaped interiors, nerve suspensions and exactly tight metal exteriors. Tesla, founded in 2003, has been experiencing quality and production problems, even though it has proven to be a fast learner.
As for electric cars, the Germans are falling behind Tesla. The Taycan can’t go as far on a charge as tesla Model S and doesn’t have Tesla’s autonomous driving software, any of which would possibly be more vital for many buyers than drag belt performance. German automakers are looking to fill the tech hole and, they hope, outperform Tesla before it’s too late.
The first manifestations of his efforts are about to reach the showrooms.
Audi, which, like Porsche, is part of the Volkswagen empire, started production in December of the battery-based e-tron GT, which will charge more than $100,000 when it goes on sale in March. however, it focuses on driving comfort than setting speed records.
Later in 2022, Audi plans to begin promoting the Q4, an SUV, this will be the department’s first style founded on the so-called modular electronic toolbox, a collection of specially designed parts for battery-based cars to be shared between Volkswagen auto brands. The toolbox allows automotive designers to make electric car interiors more spacious than gas cars by having batteries and motors in a way that is not imaginable with internal combustion engines. their area and lack of clutter.
Automakers have been employing these collections of shared components, known as platforms, for years, however Volkswagen is one of the first mass-market automakers to expand one in particular for battery power. With the same components, Volkswagen, the world’s largest automaker, hopes to do what it does best: reduce the load according to vehicles with high production volumes and outperform Tesla in price.
The strategy is helping to involve the audi Q4’s cargo, which will start at around 40,000 euros, or around $49,000, in Germany, is competitive with comparable gasoline cars and in the same diversity of overall value as Tesla’s critical car, the Model 3.
Next year, Mercedes, a Daimler department, will provide the EQS, a premium S-Class battery from the company. The EQS, which will charge more than $100,000, will be the first vehicle built with the so-called electric Mercedes. vehicle architecture, the same concept as Volkswagen’s modular toolbox.
Daimler says the EQS will be able to travel 700 kilometers, or 435 miles, on a charge, a little more than the existing Tesla S. In 2022, Daimler will introduce more models based on the electric vehicle platform, adding an SUV battery. power, which will be produced at the company’s factory in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
BMW has been slower than its competition to provide luxury electric vehicles. The company pioneered the compact battery-based i3 in 2014, but never caught the attention of buyers. BMW does not plan to start generating its own natural electric platform until 2025, it will be providing electrified versions of its traditional models.
Pieter Nota, BMW’s chief marketing officer, told reporters in November that the company expected electric vehicle sales to take off until 2025. “That’s why we started our battery-centric platform up to that point,” he said.
After stealing a significant percentage of the car market such as the BMW 3 Series and Mercedes C-Class, Tesla showed some vulnerability. Sales of model 3 in Europe have been virtually solid in recent months after particularly surpassing sales through European car brands last year. , a compact application designed for urban use, surpassed the Model 3 as the best-selling battery car in Europe in the first 10 months of 2020.
Volkswagen is seeking Tesla’s leadership in battery technology. The company has invested $300 million in QuantumScape, a Silicon Valley company that develops semiconductor batteries. If the new type of battery can be refined and produced in series, it will charge less, qualify faster and pass more than existing technology.
“If you want to bring this generation to the pre-Tesla market, then Elon Musk has a problem,” said Ferdinand Dudenhaffer, director of the Automotive Research Center in Duisburg, Germany.
Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, will take hold in Europe when his new plant in Grunheide, east of Berlin, starts generating cars in 2021.
The plant, announced through Tesla in November 2019, faced a challenge this month when environmental teams won a court order preventing Tesla from felling trees into a component of the site. The teams argued that the paintings of the structure threatened a kind of endangered sand lizard.
But Tesla enjoys the strength of extremely happy local political leaders with the prospect of 10,000 new jobs and the presence of a company that has much more value in the inventory market than all German brands put together.
The main construction of the factory in Gronheide, on an already approved site, appears to be completed. Musk, who flies for quick visits, said he continually spends the night in a factory convention room because he “provides me with a smart concept of what’s going on. “
“I’m a fan of Germany,” Musk said in Berlin this month for an award from Axel Springer, who publishes the country’s largest newspaper. “I’m going to spend a lot of time there. “
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