Roddy Graham’s Blog: 25 February 2008

Has Porsche lost it?

Has Porsche lost touch with reality? I just can’t believe it has applied for a judicial review of Ken Livingston’s planned new £25 congestion charge for gas-guzzlers. It seems 44 out of the marque’s 46-model line-up are set to be clobbered. According to Porsche Cars GB MD, Andy Goss it could cause a mass exodus of high earners from the capital! Oh, yes!

Quite frankly, I can’t believe a company of Porsche’s standing could stoop so low. It has a well-earned reputation for producing some of the best and most practical sports cars in the world. Its record at Le Mans is second to none, sealed in the Group C fuel-efficiency era.

Given its reputation for engineering excellence, why can’t it just knuckle down to the challenge of producing a high performance package that is also energy efficient and more friendly to the environment. If the brilliant minds at Weissach cannot rise to the challenge, I don’t know who can. At any one time, some of the biggest names in the automotive world are clients at the research and development facility outside Stuttgart.

Personally, I think the wheels fell off the Porsche wagon, in terms of corporate social responsibility, when they came out with one of the ugliest cars on the road today, the Porsche Cayenne, which even in its current guise cannot manage 20 mpg while pumping out a whopping 358g of CO2 per kilometre. Surely, if there was ever a time for Porsche to demonstrate its engineering prowess, it was in designing a four-wheel drive Chelsea tractor that actually pioneered fuel efficiency rather than registered one of the worst fuel economy figures on the planet.

Sorry, Porsche, you are shooting yourself in the foot. The world is changing and you need to change with it.

However, it would seem Porsche is not entirely alone. According to a latest You Gov Stone survey for KPMG, big business itself admits it is slow to meet the challenges of climate change. As a key issue, climate change has risen from 52% to 85% in the last six months, according to a poll of 200 corporate leaders but only 22% were aiming to be carbon neutral. Apparently, they still expect Government to do more to educate them.

This runs counter to our own experience of large and small companies who seem to be taking the matter very seriously with more and more companies looking to establish carbon neutrality for their fleets.