Porsche’s head of R&D Michael Steiner seems, according to an interview with Automotive News, quite certain that his employer and Tesla do not share the same space in the car market. In fact, he seems to be quite sure that Tesla’s approach and Porsche’s do not overlap in any major way, and that the two automakers are not, for that reason, in direct competition.
The comment comes in the wake of the unveiling of Porsche’s uber-slick E-sedan, the Taycan, and the news that emerged last winter: that Porsche had converted 10,000 reservations for the model into orders. It also reinforces the notion that the Taycan is the product of years of research and development. True enough. Porsche didn’t leap willy-nilly into EV design and production, of course; the company made its move only after being sure all the pieces of the marketing puzzle were in place, including the general acceptance of the idea of alternative drivetrain technology that a decade has brought. Most notably, the masterfully engineered Taycan Turbo S announced its arrival by beating the Model S P100D Ludicrous+ to 60, and by earning Bill Gates’ praise.
But the apparently offhand remark was more strategic than pragmatic. Tesla is ‘…targeting the volume segment,’ according to Steiner, and indeed, the numbers bear out the contention: 2019 saw 368,000 cars roll out of Tesla’s production facility in California, while Porsche produced 274,000 cars during the same period. However, the comment also assumes that European aristocrat Porsche inhabits a considerably more prestigious space than American upstart Tesla, and that’s a little taste of the expert brand mythologizing of Porsche’s marketing department—a team canny enough to never underestimate the considerable power of historical contextualizing and the deep credibility cachet it can conjure.
By virtue of delivering a competitor of some sort to the Model S, though, Porsche has indeed overlapped its own segment with Tesla’s, regardless of whether or not the Taycan makes the two companies direct rivals. And Tesla, by all appearances, continues to respond to Porsche’s entry into its territory. A recent announcement from Tesla informs owners of the Model S Performance with all-wheel drive and Ludicrous mode that performance numbers can easily be boosted with a software upgrade, improving the 2.5-second 0-60 launch time by two-tenths of a second, and besting the Taycan Turbo S by a tenth of a second in the process.
In the end, of course, such elliptical bickering amounts to a tempest in a teapot. The two companies are not direct rivals at present. The images and personae of these two brands are vastly different, each potent in its own manner, and enriched with its own distinctive, carefully engineered narrative. Tesla knows this, and uses the numbers game to keep their brand media-salient by competing with a performance benchmark. Just as it knows that when the two carmakers are in direct competition, as they eventually will be, it is their images that will compete above all for the soul of the buyer.
