Porsche and Audi engineers were unpleasantly surprised after they disassembled and studied TeslaModel 3 in detail.
According to Tesla-club, most of the developers were struck by the low cost of the American electric vehicle, as a result of which it was decided to send the Porsche-Audi PPE platform for refinement.
It is noted that the first Audi E-tron serial electric car was too expensive to manufacture and therefore is more a model for maintaining the image than for profit. To really make money on electric cars Porsche and Audi counted just with the launch of models based on PPE, which will appear in 2020-2021. However, after the revision of the first version of this platform, it turned out that its price for each car is 3 thousand euros higher than the estimated one. Moreover, if such a markup is still considered acceptable in Porsche, then Audi is not ready to make such expensive electric cars.
E-tron, as the first Audi electric car, was late, but this is not the only problem. It does not reach certain targets and is too expensive, since development costs are more than 2 billion euros. Approximately 600 thousand cars that were planned to be sold without losses are now viewed as an illusion, German developers note.
It is noteworthy that the first Tesla Model 3 was seen in trials in Germany about a year ago – a year before the official start of sales. However, buying cars of competitors and dismantling them to the screw is a common practice for global automakers. Earlier it was reported that in the United States the same was done by an independent auto industry expert, who came to the conclusion that Tesla can earn more than 30% of its cost on this electric car. Later, Tesla itself in its reports indicated a more modest, but still impressive profitability – 20%.