Venturi Automobiles have made an executive decision to cease production of their sports car division to focus wholly on competition.
Nicolas Mauduit, CTO of Venturi Automobiles and Team Principal and CTO at Venturi Formula E Team told ElectricAutosport.com that aside from a few side projects, streamlining the company’s activities was essential to ensure its Formula E race team remained competitive in the category’s crucial second season; with drivetrains being the main focus for development.
“For our company it was a tough decision to narrow our main activities to three: running the Formula E team, to become a manufacturer in Formula E and to focus on high performance development including the world speed record programme we have each year in August”, explained Mauduit.
Venturi Automobiles holds the record of the fastest electric vehicle, clocking in at 495 km/h.
But with the expansion of Tesla and several major car manufacturers ramping up production of their own electric fleets, Mauduit maintains the cost-effectiveness of retaining their sports car division was becoming a big question mark.
“It’s costly to develop the road cars, to train the engineers and to sell the vehicles” he said.
“With larger players on the market with different kind of pricing it became more difficult for us to be profitable. Therefore we’ve taken the decision to focus on our expertise and that is in the field of high performance powertrains with high efficiency. And that makes sense with competition too.
It has been a very difficult decision to take regarding the employees and their families, but it is important to secure the company’s long-term future.”
Image: Richard Washbrooke