Porsche Panamera sketch
Michael Taylor5 Oct 2016
NEWS

Porsche’s new 928 on hold

Two-door GT frozen as Porsche steps back from much-teased two-door Panamera

Porsche’s new ‘928’, the much-hyped two-door Panamera coupe, has been taken off the table as Porsche’s development operation strains to push its Mission E electric four-door into production.

While admitting to a potentially strong market, Porsche development boss, Michael Steiner, admitted the project had been pushed well down his list of priorities.

While the saturation of engineering being poured into the all-electric Mission E and its successors should send shudders down the spine of every Tesla investor, the cancellation of the new ‘928’ will come as a relief to Bentley, Aston Martin and even Ferrari.

But it’s not its potential rivals that have kept Porsche away from the front-engined, rear (and all-wheel drive) four-seat coupe segment. It’s an internal problem.

“For sure there would be a market for a Panamera coupe,” Steiner insisted.

“This business is much about proportions of the look, and the Panamera platform has the genes where you could do an attractive coupe.

“But finally we have to have mind when there is a huge change in terms of electrification and battery-driven cars, so with a given funding or investment in research and development, we have to decide which will be the next step to take.

“From this point of view a coupe would not be in competition with other cars, but it would be in competition with other segments we could attract or move into,” he explained.

A higher-powered Panamera Hybrid is just one of the production priorities that have pushed the coupe down the ‘to do’ list, with Steiner hinting there was an obvious precedent and a clearly defined market for it.

“We will do one more hybrid version of the Panamera and this will be more in the direction of a high-performance variant. It will be better performing than the existing one. Much more performance and agility and range.”

Porsche will quickly transfer what it has learned in the Mission E program into the electrification of the existing powertrains in its heavier models, he said.

“There are other attractive alternatives [for our resources] in electrification and hybridisation and we had to decide to have a long-wheelbase and a Sport Turismo shape and some drivetrain derivatives.

“Our architecture at least has flexibility – on the one hand we could do a hybrid of every engine with this concept; on the second [other] hand we could do different body styles and wheelbases with this platform.

“It is decided right now we will have the [Panamera] long wheelbase, and we do [with the sedan]. And that we will have a Sport Turismo [station wagon] and there will be some additional drivetrain derivatives or engine derivatives in the future,” he said.

That’s not to say Porsche hasn’t thought deeply about its big coupe, and it has a strong emotional pull for a successor to the 928. It has even built prototypes with a variety of powertrains, but thinking and tinkering are a long way from production.

“We have it on the radar but there is no decision now,” Steiner insisted.

“There is no clear answer in terms of timing for a coupe. We would have technically all the capabilities to have a competitive concept with the performance of a car like that and the architecture to do it.”

That architecture, developed in-house at Porsche with some Audi involved and dubbed MSB, will also sit beneath the upcoming Audi A9, returning the favour for Audi’s MLB Evo architecture beneath Porsche’s Cayenne.

“Also at least one additional brand from the Volkswagen Group will use this MSB platform for their models, so if you would like to know more about their plans, you could ask them,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s fair to talk too much about your brother.”

While Steiner killed off immediate hopes of big coupe lovers around the world, he teased that it may have a production future once the 2019 Mission E’s development was locked away some time in 2018.

“In the past times we did a lot of conceptual investigation, which segment, which derivatives would be the next market for Porsche,” he said.

“And we were, over the last years, very successful in doing the business step by step – the Cayenne, the Panamera, the Macan and the Mission E projects and also doing some new derivatives.

“Like all the past times we do a lot of conceptual innovations of which segments could benefit from doing this step by step,” Steiner stated.

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Written byMichael Taylor
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