Porsche's new chief executive has said out loud what the company's numbers have implied for two years. In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on 4 August 2026, Michael Leiters — who took over as CEO of Porsche AG on 1 January 2026 after running McLaren — said that Porsche cannot survive alone in its current form.
The argument for staying inside the group
Leiters was not being fatalistic so much as making a case about scale. Porsche, he argued, depends on shared investment and economies of scale within the Volkswagen Group, and that relationship is what lets a company of its volume fund a full model range at all. He named Audi as a key partner, said Porsche wants to draw on that shared potential further, and described his working relationship with Volkswagen Group CEO Oliver Blume and Audi CEO Gernot Döllner as excellent.
The practical version of the argument is already in the product plan. The next combustion Macan, due in 2028 or 2029, is expected to contribute noticeably to revenue and profitability — and it is built on group hardware rather than a Porsche-only platform.
The electric 718 survives, and so does the Taycan
For anyone tracking Porsche's electric range, the interview settled two open questions.
The electric 718 is going ahead. Leiters had been publicly sceptical about it and came down the other way: "With the electric 718, we have come to the conclusion that we will build the model — because it is the best solution economically and will be a fantastic car." It shares a platform with the coming electric Audi TT, which is the group-synergy argument compressed into a single decision.
The Taycan stays too, with fewer versions. "We do not plan to discontinue the Taycan in the short term," Leiters said. "We have invested a lot in the model and want to observe how demand develops." Trimming variants rather than retiring the car is the pattern he is applying across the range.
Nine thousand jobs, spread over a decade
The restructuring underneath all this is substantial. Porsche's Zukunftspakt removes close to 9,000 positions, with up to 5,000 further roles potentially affected, spread across ten years. Leiters called the package painful but balanced, and an agreement with the works council guarantees employment through 2035 — the mechanism that turns a headline number into attrition rather than mass redundancy.
Internally he wants Porsche run more like a mid-sized company, with smaller and more autonomous units. The implicit diagnosis is that the past two years cost Porsche its agility as much as its margin.
What Porsche wants from Europe
Leiters also used the interview to push on European regulation, saying the ramp-up of electric mobility is not developing as fast as was assumed when the EU set its CO2 targets, and calling for more flexibility along with support for renewable and synthetic e-fuels.
That lands in a live argument rather than an empty one. The EU's 2035 engine rules are already under review, with a 90% reduction floated in place of a full 100%. Porsche is not a neutral party in it either: the company has invested in synthetic-fuel production in Chile, and the flexibility it is asking Brussels for would extend the working life of the combustion cars that currently pay for the electric ones.
For European buyers the practical read is narrower than the headline. Nothing here changes what is on sale — the Taycan continues and the electric 718 is now confirmed rather than cancelled. What changes is the reasoning behind those cars: a Porsche that openly leans on Audi platforms and group scale is a different proposition from the one that spent decades insisting on its own engineering.