Want to know how tough it is to scale up battery production as a European OEM in the current climate? Even a brand as wildly successful as Porsche, with a proven track record in transitioning to the sort of EVs that people claim to want to buy – including the current Macan, but also with the Cayenne and electrified 718 pending – apparently cannot hope to generate sufficiently attractive economies of scale to pursue its own dedicated manufacturing of battery cells.
We know this because on Monday Oliver Blume, Porsche’s CEO, confirmed as much in a statement that was unusually candid about the problem. While Europe was said to be pulling its weight in the transition to battery power – fully 57 per cent of the models delivered there in the first half of 2025 were electrified – the global quota was made to look stagnant at just 36 per cent. Porsche suggested that ‘challenging conditions’ in North America and China were chiefly to blame for the shortfall and that it would ‘no longer [be] pursuing its own production of battery cells’ as a result.
Of course, this does not mean that EVs will feature any less prominently in the manufacturer’s lineup, but the long-term plan for the Cellforce Group GmbH (effectively Porsche’s independent battery division) to operate a ‘start-up factory’ in Kirchentellinsfurt before scaling up its efforts at a second location have been permanently shelved, with some job losses to follow. Given the current shortfall in predicted volume, the strategy was no longer deemed realistic.
Instead, Cellforce’s reduced footprint will be tasked with the research and development of future high-performance batteries, and feed the results back into PowerCo – the VW Group’s much larger battery venture – as part of the wider investment in EVs and the supply chain that creates them. In the short term, Porsche promised that it would still bring ‘trend-setting technologies in electromobility’ into series production – but also reiterated that combustion engines (alongside hybrid and EV solutions) would remain part of its powertrain mix ‘until well into the 2030s’. New derivatives of the 911 using the same V4Smart booster cells as the GTS are apparently being primed for imminent launch.