EXCLUSIVE!
When news broke about Porsche deciding to kill off its diesel line-up, the company insisted that while it was discontinuing diesel cars in some international markets, it was not parting ways with diesels, and that at some point in the near future, it would bring a diesel version of the new Cayenne to India. This past Sunday, however, Porsche announced it was dropping diesels for good, and now, the company has confirmed there will be no diesel-engined Cayenne for India.
In a reply to an Autocar India query, Peter Vogel, Acting Chief Executive of Porsche Middle East & Africa FZE, said, “Porsche has decided to stop offering diesel models in the current product portfolio, as a result of changing market conditions and increasing interest in hybrid and electric vehicles. This is a global decision and includes Porsche models offered in India.”
While Porsche hasn’t had a diesel model in its portfolio for some time now, the lack of a diesel engine option in the range will likely have an impact on the sales of its SUVs in India, and the Cayenne in particular, for which the diesel variant was the mainstay in previous generations. That said, Porsche insists it is seeing healthy demand for its petrol models, and is banking on them as well as the hybrid variants to generate enough demand. To that effect, Porsche will launch two more variants of the new Cayenne in October – the base model and the E-Hybrid, which will sit below the Cayenne Turbo launched earlier this year.
“For some time now, we have experienced growing enquiries in our petrol and hybrid range from customers in India. We are confident that we can meet their demand with our existing and future product portfolio. In less than four weeks from now, we are planning to launch the third generation Cayenne in India including the new Cayenne E-Hybrid,” he said.
Porsche is all set to debut its first EV, the production-spec Taycan, in international markets next year, and will hereon focus on petrols, hybrids and electric vehicles only.
The launch is scheduled for October 17, but we already have the prices for the new Cayenne range. Read all about it here.