During a roundtable interview, Ivenz told CAR magazine: ‘the future for us will be electric. It makes sense for us. In the moment, we look about the concepts – but for us it’s very important that the car is authentic also in the electric world. We will start, and we can say that in the next five years we will launch our first electric car.’
‘But is it necessary to do this in four to five years? Or is it more to carry the customers over the transition from the combustion to the electric vehicles? Is it really necessary to develop it or does our customers wonder in four or five years? That’s just one small piece of a big puzzle. It’s hard times, but very interesting times.’
Ivenz tells us the R division is already setting out its requirements for the new SSP platform now, even though his electric R car is still five years away. This is different to how performance variants were built when petrol power was the primary focus. These computers run everything on cars now so, if a manufacturer wants to launch a hot version of one of its cars, it’s cheaper and more efficient to design one set of control modules that are flexible enough to allow that in the early stages of the development process rather than having to retrofit them to the platform once the car is on sale.