Details of the pre-production variant of Porsche’s rival to the Tesla Model S, the Mission E, was recently revealed in the German carmaker’s Annual & Sustainability report for 2017. The images of the Mission E pre-production units reveal similarities and changes to the vehicle’s eye-catching concept that Porsche revealed during the 2015 Frankfurt Motor Show.
Details of the pre-production Mission E in Porsche’s recent report include the electric car’s passenger doors, which appear to have taken a step away from the concept version’s suicide doors. The pre-production design’s front, however, carries over much of the details found on the concept, including the eye-catching aerodynamic lines that bend into the car’s headlights.
The pre-production Mission E’s storage spaces were also visible in the images provided by the German legacy carmaker. Based on the photos, the frunk of the pre-production Mission E appears to be in the same ballpark as the Model 3. Thanks to its broad-hipped design, the Mission E’s rear trunk seems to have a lot of space as well.
Also included in the report is an image of the vehicle’s charge port, which is designed to be compatible with the IONITY charging network. As we noted in a previous report, the IONITY network, which is built in collaboration by the Volkswagen Group, BMW Group, Daimler AG, and the Ford Motor Company, is designed to rival Tesla’s Supercharger network. IONITY exceeds the current output of Tesla’s 120 kW Superchargers, with an output of 350 kW. With this charging infrastructure in place, Porsche claims that the Mission E could gain 248 miles of range in as little as 15 minutes.
According to a recent report from GearBrain, however, Porsche’s pay system for the IONITY network would be on the other side of the spectrum as Tesla’s Superchargers. Tesla’s high-powered Superchargers charge Model 3 owners every time they use the infrastructure, but owners of the Model S and Model X — the Elon Musk-led company’s flagships — can use the chargers for free.
In a statement to the publication, Porsche’s deputy chairman of the executive board Lutz Meschke noted that the company would bill Mission E owners for charging services from day one of ownership. The executive also noted that the rates for the IONITY network would be comparable to the prices of gasoline. The Porsche executive also downplayed the business model of Tesla’s charging infrastructure, stating that the Supercharger network “was only free for a while.”
“Yes, but it (Tesla’s Supercharger network) was only free for a while. You can not run things like this; you have to earn money from these services. We want to earn money with the new products and services,” Meschke said.
The Porsche executive’s statement about the Supercharger network’s rates is only partly true, of course, as only Model 3 owners are adopting a pay-per-use model. In a recent statement on its website announcing a price adjustment for the service, Tesla even asserted that the company is not looking to make money from the Supercharger network.
“Tesla is committed to ensuring that Supercharger will never be a profit center,” Tesla wrote.
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0 likes 4 days ago
Supercharging also takes much longer than pumping gas. That the electric fuel is marginally free offsets the opportunity costs of charging instead of pumping. This is purely a psychological effect operating on consumers. Making the relief proximate in time and location to the suffering of delay is perceived to offset the suffering. If, on the other hand, the car had cost less when you bought it but the electric fuel cost more, then the charging experience would seem more painful to the customer. Also, slow charging is a marginal cost, thus so must be the offsetting discount.
So the purpose of Tesla building Supercharging stations is to encourage Tesla sales. And making the charging free or cheap strategically improves the customer experience by targeting a deficiency specific to electric vehicles: bad feelings about slow charging.
Tesla requires payment for charging now because of a new necessity for rationing with more Tesla vehicles on the road. There needs to be some cost to the consumer of supercharging or else the resource is used inefficiently. (for general discussion of price rationing, see Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society) Yet it is foolish to set that rate at the revenue maximizing rate for the electricity itself. Rationally, it should be set that the revenue maximizing rate for revenues from both electricity sales and electric vehicle sales. That is, keep lowering the price of the charger electricity so long at the marginal decrease in electricity revenues is smaller than the resulting increase in vehicle sales revenues.
Finally, the cost of constructing a brand-specific charging network, regardless of whether customers pay at the pump for electricity or if that price is partly of fully subsidized by the car manufacture, is born by owners of a manufacturer’s cars. This gives small-volume high-margin brands such as Porshe an inherent strategic disadvantage compared to Tesla, which is aiming, in the long term, for a high-volume sales market.
Porshe executives seem not to understand the fundamental economics of the electric vehicle market.
