Porsche plotting all-electric supercar

German premium brand Porsche won’t abandon its roots in the switch to battery power and is already developing all-electric sports and supercars.

Its all-new battery-electric sports car architecture, dubbed SPE, will headline the ‘Third Wave’ of the Volkswagen Group’s electrification strategy, arriving after 2025.

The existence of the new SPE program was revealed in a PowerPoint presentation the Volkswagen Group delivered to investors late last year (pictured).

Believed to be based around solid-state battery technology to save space and increase range, it will have the option of two, three or even four electric motors.

The presentation clearly showed the Volkswagen Group aiming to unseat the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance for electric mobility leadership before the middle of the next decade. The strategy then goes on to target world leadership by 2030.

The company’s e-mobility charge will begin its ‘First Wave’ next year with the volume MEB (modular electric architecture) for the Volkswagen, Skoda and Seat brands.

Volkswagen will lead the charge from 2020 with the I.D. hatch, which is Golf-sized on the outside but Passat-sized inside, and will spearhead a range of battery-electric VW models including a Kombi-recalling people-mover and crossover.

Porsche’s first electric car, the Mission E sedan (pictured here in testing), won’t sit on any of the all-new platforms, but will instead use the J1 architecture it has already developed.

Audi’s first EVs – including this year’s e-tron SUV, the subsequent e-tron Sportback crossover and a small car -- will come from both the J1 and the even-earlier C-BEV platform, which was the first premium EV platform developed by the Volkswagen Group.

The ‘Second Wave’ will be the all-new premium PPE architecture in 2021, developed jointly by Porsche and Audi.

This architecture will sit beneath all new battery-electric Audis, Lamborghinis (including the second-generation Urus and an unnamed sports sedan), Bentleys and Porsches.

And then will come the sports cars and supercars, giving the Volkswagen Group three purpose-built battery-electric car architectures within the next seven years.

SPE already has two confirmed body styles and sizes within Porsche, including a cheaper two-seat convertible, and at least two roles within Audi.

It could also go a long way towards making Lamborghini’s Terzo Millennio concept car a reality. Though it wouldn’t have the concept’s all-carbon layout, the SPE platform has been engineered to cope with both the upper and lower ends of Lamborghini’s supercar range.

The arrangement should also take some of the heat out of the turf war between Porsche and Audi, which have been at loggerheads over the futures of the 911 and the R8.

Porsche has demanded Audi switch the next version of its mid-engined R8 supercar (and, therefore, Lamborghini’s next Hurucan) to its 911 platform, but Audi Sport has pushed back hard.

Sources say that uncompromising stances over the “engineering folly” of a front fuel tank location cost both Audi Sport engineering head Stephan Reil and president Stephan Winkelmann their jobs.

Yet the Volkswagen Group has shown faith in Porsche’s engineering partly because of lingering Dieselgate effects and partly because Porsche is already seen as an electrification leader inside the Group.

More than half of Porsche’s European Panamera sales are hybrids, and it expects more than half of all its cars to be electrified by 2025.