Production problems at Volkswagen have caused Porsche to rethink ambitious plans to roll out the Cayenne worldwide early in the new year.
Production problems at Volkswagen have caused Porsche to rethink ambitious plans to roll out the Cayenne world wide early in the new year.
The Cayenne, the first SUV to be produced by the Zuffenhausen firm, caused a stir at the Auto Africa motor show in October. The event marked only the second time the first-of-its-kind Porsche had been shown to the public.
But now it seems the Cayenne, which was co-developed by Porsche and Volkswagen, will not burst on to showroom floors as early as Porsche had expected. Porsche had hoped a major debut would make up for Volkswagen’s late unveiling of its variant, the Touareg. But VW thwarted that plan, Porsche sources said.
“We could have launched the Cayenne earlier,” a Porsche manager told this week. “Our car was ready months ago. But the VW Touareg was not.”
Instead of a planned blitz European introduction of the Cayenne, Porsche shipped two models to each of 126 German, Swiss and Austrian dealers. Each dealer in the three German-speaking markets got a Cayenne S and a Turbo demo model for a low-key December 7 introduction.
Sales in the rest of Europe will follow in January and the South African launch of the Cayenne will take place at the end of March – at the earliest.
Apparently, VW wanted to unveil the Toureg first, even though Porsche maintains it had an agreement to launch the Cayenne before its Wolfsburg cousin. “That was agreed upon, but it all changed,” a Porsche source said.
Porsche had originally planned to build enough Cayennes at its Leipzig plant to give each dealership in Europe two demos and several deliverable cars late in the third quarter of this year.
However, Porsche gets its Cayenne bodies from Volkswagen’s plant in Bratislava, Slovakia, where the Touareg is assembled. And only a few bodies flowed while the Touareg production was launched, Porsche insiders say.
Parts from other Volkswagen plants were also slow to be delivered, the report said. Porsche started Cayenne production in August, but had produced only 800 by early December, too few for a Europe-wide launch.