Will The All-New 2025 Porsche Macan EV Succeed?

Imagine you are the chef who has to create a new recipe for McDonald’s French fries, the fast-food giant’s best-selling item. While today’s customers are delighted with the taste and texture of the thin strips of deep-fried potato, you are being forced to make them healthy, so using any type of fry oil is out of the question — moving forward, they will be microwaved.

Today’s challenge facing Porsche, the German automobile manufacturer renowned for high-performance sports cars, is analogous. Its best-selling vehicle, the compact luxury crossover Macan, is being completely redesigned. And unlike every Macan on the road for the past decade (about 750,000 units globally), the replacement will be 100 percent combustion-free — Porsche is making the new 2025 Macan electric.

Making such a drastic change to your best-selling vehicle is daunting, especially when pure-electric vehicles have lost their luster due to consumer dissatisfaction and lousy press (see 5 Reasons Why Electric Vehicle Sales Have Slowed). This leaves many to wonder if the all-new 2025 Porsche Macan EV will be as successful as the current model.

Today’s combustion-powered Macan is an honest home run for Porsche. Introduced in 2015, the new Macan shared platforms with the Audi Q5 (riding on architecture from 2008) but with Porsche engines, transmissions, suspension, brakes, body panels, interiors, and more. Consumers loved its size, styling, and sporty driving dynamics.

The Macan was such a showroom winner that Porsche decided there was no reason to mess with success. When Audi redesigned its Q5 with an all-new platform for 2018, Porsche skipped the costly redesign and doubled down on the aging platform with a minor refresh (this means the 2024 Porsche Macan is still a first-generation platform now celebrating its 16^th birthday). Consumers don’t seem to care, as the automaker sold 26,947 Macan models in the US in 2023 — its best sales year in history.

Switching to an all-electric platform isn’t technically challenging, as Porsche has been selling its Taycan EV for years. However, its driving enthusiast customer base isn’t running into showrooms to buy them. The automaker sold 7,570 units of its Taycan pure-EV in North America in 2023 (the sedan is the company’s fourth best-selling vehicle), an increase of 4.1 percent over 2022. However, the combustion-powered Macan enjoyed a sales increase of 13.7 percent during the same period (2023 was a rebound year for the industry, with overall sales up 11.5 percent) — and there are no hybrid models in the lineup, either. This should concern Porsche executives.

Understandably, Porsche isn’t exactly jumping in with both feet. The automaker initially said the combustion Macan would be sold side-by-side with its new EV sibling for the first year or so. Then, the company will wean its enthusiasts from gasoline and attempt to convert them to electrons — fingers crossed.

The 2025 Porsche Macan EV will likely be a sales success for its first year or two. Early adopters will embrace the newness of the freshest model in the lineup, and an electric offering in the compact luxury crossover segment will draw new customers to Porsche who were previously driving cars from Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and other premium brands (the industry calls these “conquest” sales).

Nevertheless, as driving enthusiasts still haven’t fully embraced any pure-electric vehicles, Porsche’s greatest challenge is to look outside its traditional customer base to fill the void. Entice new clientele with innovative technology, driving dynamics, and brand cache, and they will come. Succeed, and the company will be selling 25,000-plus Macan EV crossovers annually in 2027 and onwards.

And in case you are wondering, McDonald’s has never seriously considered microwaving its fries. However, bad press in 1990 swayed the company to stop frying its potatoes in rendered beef fat and switch to vegetable oil. Customers were not pleased with the new taste, and McDonald’s stock plummeted. (Today, the company uses healthier canola-blend oil.)