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| There'll be no Porsche diesels in the future, CEO Oliver Blume says. Instead, the German company will focus on "powerful petrol, hybrid and, from 2019, purely electric vehicles" |
Sports car maker Porsche said Sunday it would become the first German auto giant to abandon the diesel engine, reacting to parent company Volkswagen's emissions cheating scandal and resulting urban driving bans.
"There
won't be any Porsche diesels in the future," CEO Oliver Blume told the
newspaper Bild am Sonntag.
Instead,
the company would concentrate on what he called its core strength,
"powerful petrol, hybrid and, from 2019, purely electric vehicles".
The Porsche
chief conceded the step was a result of the three-year-old
"dieselgate" scandal at auto giant Volkswagen, the group to which the
luxury sports car brand belongs.
VW in 2015
admitted to US regulators to having installed so-called "defeat
devices" in 11 million cars worldwide to dupe emissions tests.
It has so
far paid out more than 27 billion euros in fines, vehicle buybacks, recalls and
legal costs and remains mired in legal woes at home and abroad.
Diesel car
sales have dropped sharply as several German cities have banned them to bring
down air pollution -- a trend that Chancellor Angela Merkel was due to discuss
with car company chiefs in Berlin later Sunday.
Stuttgart-based
Porsche in February stopped taking orders for diesel models, which it had sold
for nearly a decade.
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Porsche's
move out of diesel enjoys follows the three-year-old "dieselgate"
scandal at
auto giant Volkswagen, the German group to which the luxury sports
car brand belongs
|
Blume said
Porsche had "never developed and produced diesel engines", having
used Audi motors, yet the image of the brand had suffered.
"The
diesel crisis has caused us a lot of trouble," he said, months after
Germany's Federal Transport Authority ordered the recall of nearly 60,000
Porsche SUVs in Europe.
Blume
promised that the company would keep servicing diesel models on the road now.
According
to the paper, Porsche also faces claims of having manipulated engines to
produce a more powerful sound with a technique that was deactivated during
testing.
Blume
acknowledged that German regulators had found irregularities in the 8-cylinder
Cayenne EU5, affecting some 13,500 units.
Merkel,
Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer and heads of German auto companies were due
to meet in Berlin later Sunday to discuss steps to avoid more city driving
bans.
The German
government hopes to see one million fully electric and hybrid vehicles on the
road by 2022, up from fewer than 100,000 at the start of this year.
After years watching Tesla's electric cars speed ahead while they have been on the defensive over an industry-wide diesel emissions scandal, German high-end manufacturers have finally unveiled their first challengers to the Californian upstart https://t.co/11uuHMpZTj— AFP news agency (@AFP) September 23, 2018
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