Porsche scraps production of diesel cars

Global Business

Porsche scraps production of diesel cars

Porsche is known for its luxury vehicles. Not for its diesel offerings anymore though. It’s scrapping production of diesel vehicles.

The German carmaker, part of the Volkswagen Group, is to focus on EV technology and remove diesel completely from its lineup, the first of the German carmakers to do this.

CGTN’s Phil Lavelle reports.

Bisi Ezerioha is a Porsche fanatic based in Ontario, California, near Los Angeles.

He owns 16 Porsches and had been planning on getting a seventeenth. But he was specific in his choice; he wanted to get a diesel model. He’ll struggle to do that now, he said.

“I love Porsches and it’s a market that I have very near and dear ties to as you can see from my collection. However, diesels are vehicles that allow you to get much better gas mileage from than a regular gasoline engine and are extremely robust and reliable because it’s just their design. Their inherent design is fantastic. I have a tow vehicle that is a diesel that I have used to tow across countries to races and shows and it’s been pretty much bulletproof,” Ezerioha said.

Diesel has faced a rough road lately. The Volkswagen emissions scandal doing it no favors, as VW admitted that it rigged millions of diesel vehicles to cheat emissions tests, a move that cost the company billions of dollars and hit the whole auto family, Porsche included.

Auto journalist Amelia Dalgaard noted that among her colleagues, “many of us had actually forgotten that they were part of the VW group.”

She thinks this is a sign of things to come because the vehicle industry is changing.

“US car consumers haven’t really embraced diesel. We’ve never really gotten over the whole dirty diesel idea. But internationally, the infrastructures that are being built, mainly in China and the U.S. and now in Europe are embracing EV. So where consumer demand and the infrastructure goes, the car companies have to follow,” Dalgaard said.

Market analysts predict global sales of electric vehicles to hit two million in 2019, helped in part by a drop in cost of batteries, the main component, down by 80 percent this decade. The car industry is heading in a whole new direction. Porsche wants to make sure it’s on that journey, too.