Things escalated quickly between 2019 and 2020 over at Porsche, with the former bring news that the 2021 Porsche Macan will only be offered with an all-electric drivetrain. Of course, 2021 is here, and guess what? The electric Macan doesn’t even exist outside of Porsche’s walls. That’s because in early 2020, we learned that Porsche was thinking about a “double Macan” strategy in which it will update the current-gen Macan to sell alongside the next-gen electric Macan. It’s good news for those that don’t want to make the transition to electric go juice, but it also means the next-gen Macan had to be delayed. Now we’ve learned something new, and it seems that the Macan EV might not be a Macan at all. Wait… what?

Is the Macan EV a Macan or Something Different?

So, in the few years that we’ve known the Macan was going to go electric, a lot has changed. 2021 was supposed to be the year that the new Macan EV hit the market, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Porsche used the end of 2020 to release the Macan Turbo, and the 2021 model year brought us the Porsche Macan GTS. In late 2020, Porsche decided to facelift the recently updated Macan yet again – this was the third update of this generation, mind you – and a month later, we finally received spy shots that confirmed Porsche was working on the Macan EV. The third update of the current-gen Macan certainly hints that Porsche is planning to keep it around a little longer, but how long? And what’s actually going on with the Macan EV? Well, things are starting to get weird.

As of now, we’re expecting the Macan EV to land in 2023, and it’ll ride on Porsche’s PPE architecture which is completely different than what underpins the Macan we have today. Naturally, two vehicles on two different platforms usually don’t share a name (or much of anything else, for that matter), so inquiring minds started to ask questions. Speaking with Roadshow, Michael Steiner, a member of Porsche’s executive board for R&D, did confirm that the ICE-powered Macan will continue to exist alongside one driven by battery power. However, as for the name of the battery electric vehicle, not even Porsche knows.

Macan in the market is not decided today.”>

This is very interesting, indeed. Steiner did admit that both models, regardless of name, will be very close in overall size, but he stopped short of confirming whether or not they’ll both look similar – or similar enough to share the same name. The electric Macan, as we’ll call it for now, will feature the Taycan’s 800-Volt architecture, but we’ve now learned that the Macan will have slightly better range than the Taycan, which was laughable at best when it was revealed.

Hmmmm, I wonder where they got that idea. Back to the point at hand, Steiner says the Macan will be offered with two different battery sizes depending on market, but given the nature of the industry in the U.S. – we typically go for bigger batteries and more range – the electric Macan may only be sold with the larger battery and will, therefore, (we assume) be more expensive. However, the important takeaway his is that the Macan Electric will have “significanly more than the Taycan.”

Does “significant” mean 20 miles or 100 miles? We’re not sure, and we’ll have to wait for official figures, but if Porsche plans to hit the market with the electric Macan for the 2023 model year, it’ll only be a year or so before we learn a whole lot more about it.