Porsche and the Pitfalls of the Climate Change Narrative
If one wanted to find a concrete example of the extent to which dominant cultural narratives – driven ostensibly by scientific rigour and moral superiority – can easily and unwittingly unwind themselves, and undermine their protagonists, one should not look much further than the fate of Porsche AG. In fact, embedded in the story of Porsche AG, since its listing in September 2022, is a cautionary tale of corporate hubris and the pace at which cultural tastes and biases change.
On 24 October 2025, Porsche announced the sudden departure of its CEO of ten years, Oliver Blume, who will be replaced by Michael Leiters, formerly the chief executive of McLaren. That same day, the company delivered sombre news about its financial performance this year. With sales falling steadily through the first nine months of 2025, Porsche had already issued three profit warnings and on 24 October, it reported an operating loss for the third quarter of almost €1 billion.
The news came as a surprise, considering Porsche’s storied record of performance. Porsche joined the Volkswagen Group in 2012 and quickly became one of the group’s most profitable brands. In 2022, the decision was made to list Porsche separately, enabling shareholders to extract more value and enabling Volkswagen to use IPO proceeds to help fund its broader electrification transformation. Following its listing, Porsche’s market capitalisation soared above €100 billion in early 2023 and the luxury brand continued to prove a strong profit generator for the larger Volkswagen group – in the past three years, Porsche’s vehicle sales accounted for less than 4% of Volkswagen’s worldwide sales but produced almost 30% of the group’s operating profit.
By the end of last year, however, the company’s market capitalisation had fallen to just over $50 billion and remained around this mark through 2025. Its market capitalisation now sits at $48 billion, 52 percent down over just two years. Most distressingly for investors, while costs have escalated, sales have declined, amid a general market decline in demand for electric vehicles.
Porsche attributes their decline in sales to a confluence of factors: a general cooling in luxury spending from pandemic-era highs, mounting costs and uncertainty stemming from US trade tariffs, and a 20% contraction in Chinese sales during the first nine months of 2025, driven by waning demand and intensifying competition from domestic automakers such as BYD and Xiaomi. Another obvious contributing factor has also been Porsche’s over-investment in producing electric vehicles (EVs).
Amid growing global concern over climate change and undoubtedly influenced by the reputational damage of the infamous Volkswagen “Dieselgate scandal” in 2015, Porsche decided to shift its focus toward EVs, following a trend embraced by many automakers worldwide over the past decade. In 2011, a plug-in hybrid version of the Porsche Panamera was introduced, followed in 2014 by Porsche’s first hybrid Cayenne SUV. Porsche’s first fully battery-electric model, the Taycan, was launched in 2019 and in 2024, Porsche announced the expansion of its best-selling Macan lineup, which had previously been available as an internal-combustion engine (ICE) version only. Revealed in January 2024, and released in 2025, the second-generation Macan will now be electric-only, with the intention of phasing out the ICE version entirely.
Overly enthusiastic about capitalising on the momentum of the climate change narrative, Porsche underestimated the possibility that global demand for EVs might not meet its high expectations, believing that by 2030, 80% of its sales would come from EVs. Porsche further underestimated that China, by far the world’s most dominant supplier of batteries and other components for electric vehicles, would themselves be capable of producing high-quality EVs at a far lower price. Given the Chinese Communist Party’s involvement in commerce over the past several years, including the disappearance of Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, for a couple of months, this was a major strategic oversight.
Seeking to reassure its investors, Porsche announced in September of this year that it will be realigning its product strategy, signalling a pause in its EV expansion plans and a renewed focus on its core petrol-engine models. Porsche’s new SUV series above the Cayenne, which was intended to be fully electric, will now initially be offered as combustion engine and plug-in hybrid while models such as the Panamera and the Cayenne will be available with combustion engines and plug-in hybrids for at least the next decade. Market launches of new all-electric vehicle models have meanwhile been postponed.
In reflecting on the state of the world and searching for clarity amid today’s turbulence, Porsche AG’s story stands as a powerful reminder of the importance of thinking beyond the dominant narratives that shape our views and opinions. Since climate change first exploded into the global consciousness, the discourse surrounding it has been moulded by competing political, economic, commercial and ideological forces. These influences have produced deep contradictions within the climate narrative itself, which continues to evolve as it is reshaped to serve shifting agendas. Failing to see the narratives for what they are and failing to critically examine them can prove a costly mistake, as Porsche has found out.
Don’t get me wrong – not for an instant am I suggesting that the climate isn’t changing. Nor am I saying that human activities are not the cause. What I am saying is that we exist in a maelstrom of ideological harassment, created in part by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, propagated by politicians and policy-makers in a ubiquitous act of relentless virtue-signalling, and driven oftentimes by pseudoscience, not actual science. The contradictions and hypocrisies that have come to define these annual climate change conferences, is this year epitomised best by the construction of a new highway that has been carved through the Amazon rainforest, to transport attendees to COP30 to be held in Belém, Brazil.
When corporations, wracked with guilt over their historical contribution to emissions, swing to the opposite extreme and uncritically amplify the prevailing narrative, stripping consumers of choice in the process, they do so at their own peril. Such corporate hubris comes at a price – a price of $52 billion.
This article is an opinion piece by David Buckham. The views in this article are those of Buckham, and do not represent the views of BusinessTech and its associated companies.
David Buckham is the Founder and CEO of international consultancy Monocle Solutions. He is co-author, alongside Robin Wilkinson, of the recently released The Spell: A Story of Human Progress and How the West Lost its Soul.
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