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Porsche shutters e-bike, battery, software subsidiaries as part of company overhaul

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Porsche is closing three of its subsidiaries as it copes with falling sales and declining profits, the German automaker announced Friday.

The automaker’s battery subsidiary, Cellforce Group, is perhaps the highest-profile casualty. The division had already been through a “realignment” in August after Porsche dropped plans to make its own batteries, turning Cellforce into a research and development arm. Now, Porsche says it’s pursuing a “technology-open powertrain strategy” — corporate-speak that indicates the automaker will rely more heavily on other companies for its batteries.

Porsche eBike Performance, which made e-bike drive systems, and Cetitec, a networking software subsidiary that served both Porsche and the wider Volkswagen Group, will also be shut down.

More than 500 people, who are employed at the three subsidiaries, will lose their jobs.

“We must refocus on our core business,” Porsche CEO and Executive Chair Michael Leiters said in a statement. “This is the indispensable foundation for a successful strategic realignment. This forces us to make painful cuts — including our subsidiaries.”

It’s a message that Leiters, who became CEO early this year, first delivered in March when the company announced plans to realign its business. “We will comprehensively reposition Porsche, make the company leaner, faster and the products even more desirable,” he said at the time.

Since then, Porsche has extracted itself from several endeavors, including an agreement reached in April to sell its equity stakes in Bugatti Rimac and Rimac Group to a consortium led by New York-based investment firm HOF Capital.

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Porsche’s electrification efforts got off to a strong start with the Taycan in 2019, but the company soon ran into trouble developing follow-on EVs. The Macan Electric was delayed by nearly two years as software development within Volkswagen’s Cariad division lagged behind expectations.

The entire company has suffered declining sales in key markets, including North America, where sales fell 11%, and China, where deliveries were off 21% in the first quarter of this year. European sales were also down 18%, though they rose slightly in Germany.

Porsche has blamed EV adoption for its woes, though the company’s continued poor performance in China, where electric vehicles have claimed more than half the market, suggests that consumer acceptance of EVs may not be the root cause.

The closure of Cellforce captures the change of fortunes for Porsche’s EV program. The German automaker had originally started the subsidiary to develop and manufacture batteries that would distinguish its EVs from other companies.

“The battery cell is the combustion chamber of the future,” Oliver Blume said in 2022 when he chaired Porsche’s executive board.

After struggling to develop EVs in a timely manner, Porsche has shifted much of its new vehicle efforts to reviving some its internal combustion platforms, which were originally intended to constitute a minority of sales by 2030. The company is still planning to rollout new EVs though, and will soon sunset the gas-powered version of the Porsche Macan. Porsche is expected to bring an all-electric version of the Cayenne, and several variants, to market this year.

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Nvidia Adds Hardware Monitoring Design to AI Agent Safety Platform

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Nvidia adds a Sentry hardware monitoring design to its AI agent safety platform. See what OpenShell offers now and what IT teams still need to verify.

The post Nvidia Adds Hardware Monitoring Design to AI Agent Safety Platform appeared first on TechRepublic.

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Shopify opens checkout to browser-based AI agents

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While some retailers, like Amazon (and Adidas, apparently!), are blocking AI agents from making purchases on users’ behalf on their respective platforms, e-commerce platform Shopify has moved in the other direction.

On Monday, the company announced that browser-based AI agents can now complete purchases on Shopify merchants’ sites, extending their capabilities beyond just searching for products and adding items to carts.

Shopify previously supported WebMCP for its storefronts and carts, allowing browser-based AI agents to comb through a Shopify retailer’s inventory, search for products, and add them to a cart. The addition of WebMCP support for checkout, including Shop Pay, means these agents can now read the checkout screen, update it, and submit the transaction with the buyer’s authorization, without relying on screenshots or scraping webpages, the company said.

Image Credits:Shopify

This update introduces three new tools — get_checkout, update_checkout, and complete_checkout — that allow agents to inspect a checkout, change things like the customer’s address or delivery option, and then place an order after the buyer authorizes it.

The feature is rolling out to all eligible Shopify merchants, said Gil Greenberg, a staff product manager who works on agentic commerce at Shopify, in a post on X.

Shopify already offers a hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which allows agents to work server-to-server. The proposed standard WebMCP, meanwhile, is designed for agents that work inside the buyer’s browser. Both leverage Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which provides a common way to search for and discover products, build carts, and check out.

Top AI agents like Muse and Instinct already have direct partnerships with Shopify for agentic commerce. The Instinct partnership was announced today.

“If your agent is operating in the buyer’s browser, use WebMCP tools provided on storefront and checkout to efficiently complete order placement, instead of navigating HTML built for humans,” Greenberg wrote on X. “These WebMCP tools provide structured and efficient APIs, purposely designed — via UCP — to ensure accurate commerce facts, required disclosures, and handoff requirements.”

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Tesla delays Roadster 2 event again due to bad weather

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Tesla is pushing back the reveal of its redesigned, second-generation Roadster once again, this time due to a forecast of severe weather.

Originally slated for October 1 in Waco, Texas, the event is being pushed to October 15, Tesla said.

“We’ve been tracking the weather closely with local meteorologists, but given the severe conditions predicted & because this event can only be held outdoors, we’ve made the difficult decision to reschedule,” the company wrote in a post on X.

The event presumably needs to be held outdoors because Tesla has been working on integrating cold gas thrusters from SpaceX that are supposed to make the Roadster fly in some capacity.

This reveal has been delayed many times before, and Musk has pushed it for months altogether before this scheduled date. At one point, Musk even planned to hold the event on April Fools’ day of this year. He said during Tesla’s annual meeting in 2025 — the same one where he was awarded a $1 trillion pay package — that an April Fools’ day event would offer him “some deniability” if it got delayed again.

“Like, I could say I was just kidding,” he said at the time.

Tesla first showed off its concept of a second-generation Roadster in 2017 at an event where it debuted the Semi, the company’s electric big rig. The new-look roadster was supposed to be the first supercar the company designed from the ground up, as the original Roadster, which got the company its start in the early 2010s, was largely based on the Lotus Elise.

At the time, Tesla promised the new Roadster was just a few years away. It collected $50,000 deposits from prospective customers of the car, which had an estimated base price of around $200,000. Some people even paid the company $250,000 to reserve one of 1,000 “Founders Series” versions of the supercar.

The project languished for years, until Musk reportedly tasked the Tesla team with redesigning the second-generation Roadster, and committed to the idea of using the SpaceX thrusters.

The promise of something outrageous like a flying car hasn’t been enough to tame critics of Musk and Tesla. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X that “7.5 years has felt like a long time to wait” for his own new Roadster, though Musk claimed Altman had gotten a refund.

Much like the Roadster will be at this event, the ship date for the vehicle is up in the air. Musk himself has said he expects it to take a year or more before the new Roadster goes into production after it is finally revealed.

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