The Porsche brand will have to pay €100 million ($113 million USD at current exchange rates) to Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles’ as compensation for backing out on a production deal.
Automotive News reports that an internal deal has been struck within the Volkswagen Group to allow Porsche to build its upcoming high-performance EV at its own site, rather than at the Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles’ Hanover plant.
Previous plans would have had the Porsche vehicle built at the site alongside its sister vehicles from Audi and Bentley. All were supposed to be built as part of Audi’s Artemis Project, which would create new technologies for highly automated vehicles.
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Porsche, though, believes that its buyers are less interested in automation than they are in performance, and so does not want to use many of the advanced driver assistance systems offered by Artemis.
“Since Porsche will use a different platform in its model planning, production in Stöcken offers hardly any meaningful synergies,” wrote Porsche Holding in a statement in December. “Building two new production lines with different platforms would unnecessarily increase complexity.”
In that same press release, the chairwoman of the works council at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Bertina Murkovic, expressed her “disappointment over Porsche’s rejection of the Hanover site.” She also hinted at an agreement relating to it.
Per this report, the deal between the companies will include a payment of €100 million from Porsche to Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles in order to replace lost production with other models.
Porsche will now build its electric flagship, known internally as the K1, at its plant in Leipzig. The vehicle will still be based on an EV architecture developed jointly by Audi and Porsche, even though it won’t be using the technology developed by Audi for the Artemis Project.
Volkswagen’s Hanover plant, meanwhile, will be the site of construction for the all-electric Volkswagen ID.Buzz, as well as the flagship electric vehicles built by Audi and Bentley.
