Revealed: Porsche’s plan to electrify the 718 Cayman – and the legendary 911

Phew. For a moment there it looked touch and go, like the sports car might die with the engine. Not on Porsche’s watch. Meet the electric 911 and Cayman/Boxster. Words Georg Kacher and Ben Miller Illustrations Avavarii.

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Mission R racing concept paves the way for electric versions of the next Cayman (top left) and the iconic 911.

The battery-electric car is becoming many things – commonplace, almost affordable, practical, indecently quick – but still it struggles to trigger drive lust: that urge to jump in, lay thick black arcs of rubber on the road and just drive for the indulgent, hedonistic thrill of driving. A 911 GT3 has this. The Taycan, for all its merit, does not.

The Mission R? Electric, and yet there’s drive lust.

Officially the R is a concept: a study into what Porsche customer racing might look like in the nascent electric age. But Stuttgart’s track record for turning electric concepts into road cars is second to none. (Think Mission E and Mission E Cross Turismo, both of which debuted as show cars and are now on sale.) And Porsche is not being shy about the Mission R, both as a feasible racecar and as a testbed and preview for the electric Cayman and Boxster, due on sale in the next two or three years.

Wait, testbed? Oh yes. ‘We already tested some solid laps with the rolling chassis, with Timo Bernhard driving,’ admits Matthias Scholz, director of GT race cars. ‘It’s a totally drivable car. We have a lot of development work to do, for sure, but it’s a proper working car.’

The road cars the Mission R previews should be similarly lightweight for EVs

That the Mission R is also the same size as a Cayman is no accident. ‘In terms of dimensions it’s very similar to the current Cayman and Boxster,’ says Ingo Scheinhütte, exterior design manager at Porsche’s advanced studio. ‘It looks bigger because it sits on proper 18-inch racing rims. Of course, at the same time as working on this car we are also working on production cars. It’s the same team. You will definitely see very similar design cues on many of our future production cars.’

Scheinhütte’s boss, Porsche design overlord Michael Mauer, is in no hurry to contradict his colleague. ‘It’s always fun to design a car and, when you love cars, it’s even more exciting when that car has the potential to become a racing car,’ says Mauer. ‘But there is a challenge in the fact that, with a customer racing sports car there always has to be possible connection to a production car. But this was not limiting. It was exciting.’

That the Mission R makes so much sense in both its timing and its feasibility as a design and engineering preview is no accident. It’s a key part of Porsche’s plan to electrify – and by extension to save – the sports car. And that plan that wasn’t hurriedly cooked up in the nine months it took to create the Mission R.

‘Ten years ago we started with electric prototypes that used the [same] mid-engined layout [as the Mission R], with the battery in the space of the engine and transmission,’ confirms Dr Michael Steiner, member of the board for R&D. Yes: 2011, people. Tesla was yet to release the Model S. So, Herr Bernhard’s already busy cutting laps. But is he enjoying himself?

Flip your combustion-engined mindset to e-power and the Mission R’s all-wheel drive makes sense

We suspect so. The Mission R is fast. Like most cars in the Taycan range it uses twin e-motors (the front rated at 429bhp, the rear 626bhp) for four-wheel drive. The concept claims 1073bhp in qualifying trim or 671bhp for races. It promises to launch 0-62mph in just 2.5sec (eek) and power on past 186mph in a cacophony of tyre roar and gear whine (motorsport insiders claim it’s anything but silent).

But power alone cannot inspire drive lust. It’s the Mission R package that’s exciting. It carries its battery where you’ll find the engine in a Cayman. So, it should drive like a Cayman. And while the production cars it previews almost certainly won’t generate the same power outputs as the Mission R, they should be similarly lightweight for an EV. The concept weighs less than 1500kg, for the power-to-weight ratio of a 911 GT2 RS. Accepted battery-electric packaging wisdom suggests you arrange the cells in a giant slab in the floor because, well, where else are you going to put them? It’s a good layout for crash protection and for a low centre of gravity, but it elevates the occupants, relative to the road. Not a problem in an SUV, and the Taycan solved the problem in part with cut-outs for your feet, but a problem in something claiming to be a sports car.

‘In a sports car the silhouette should be as low and the driver needs to be sitting as low as possible,’ explains R&D’s Dr Steiner. ‘There is no space for the battery below the seat or the driver’s feet. Instead we have our core battery design. In terms of packaging and centre of gravity it’s more or less a copy of a mid-engined design. But now it’s not the engine – because the electric motors are pretty small – it’s the battery. Now you have a weight distribution optimised for sporty driving, and we reflect this in the four-wheel- drive system’s torque split. We have much more torque in the back than the front.’

The Mission R is able to accept 340kW charging, enabling it to go from five per cent charged to 80 per cent in just 15 minutes between races. While Porsche cedes these figures are based on another step forward in battery development, this isn’t pie-in-the-sky stuff, just good old lithium-ion, done right and properly managed. Direct oil-cooling for the battery pack means it’s able to run hard without thermal degradation, while 900-volt electrics (the Taycan is 800 volt) bring rapid charging and improved efficiency without requiring all-new componentry or infrastructure.

‘For us, the key in this decade will be the cell chemistry and the cooling capacity of the cells,’ confirms Dr Steiner. ‘In the Mission R oil flows directly around the cells. It’s the same principle as liquid cooling in an engine – the closer the cooling fluid comes to the source of heat, the better. We’re working on technologies where we could bring the cooling fluid directly to the terminals of the cells.

‘Of course, you could not put water directly to the cells. This would be a problem! But there are already fluids, used in power stations, that could be used; a transformer oil. We used it in the 919 Hybrid [Le Mans car]. We did not say this back then but today I’m willing to tell you we had fluid cooling in the battery and also in the electric motors and inverters. You will not see this direct cooling in volume production cars but, from our point of view, it is a must in serious racecars and, at some point, maybe in some high-performance street cars as well.

‘In term of the battery, there is still huge potential within what I call the 1000-volt class. You can go from 800 to 900 volts within more or less the same specification, whereas it is another huge step from 1000 volts to 2000, as it was from 400 to 800. You have to change the specifications of every component and the infrastructure.’

If all of the above sounds like ferociously logical Porsche thinking, it’s the same with virtually every aspect of this car. Take the all-wheel-drive system. On a racecar and, potentially, a roadgoing Cayman? Doesn’t sound right. But flip your combustion-engined mindset to e-power and it all makes sense.

Steiner: ‘There are a lot of good reasons for this – it is not only wet and winter conditions that favour four-wheel drive. With e-mobility there is another dimension that doesn’t exist with conventional cars: energy regeneration. Under deceleration the front axle has more grip, which is why on a sports car the front brakes are always bigger than the rears, and this is the main reason electric race cars benefit from four-wheel drive – to maximise regeneration potential.’

To drive, then, both the Mission R and the production cars it previews will feel rear-wheel drive, even if their front axles will work to reclaim power that’d otherwise be lost to hot discs and pads.

The Mission R’s shot through with design logic too, heading in a direction design boss Michael Mauer plotted years ago between the EV aesthetic excesses of cars like the i3 and the ultra-conservative approach of, say, Tesla’s Model S.

‘We have seen very different approaches from the car industry,’ muses Mauer. ‘We saw the full bandwidth of possibilities but we already had a very well defined design strategy based on the concepts of brand identity and product identity. We knew from the beginning we needed elements that were about brand identity, because the Taycan needed to be a Porsche. But it also needed new elements to make it a Taycan. The headlamps are product identity but right now we’re in a transition phase. We’re using the same themes for all our EVs. But in the future, when we have more of them, we will start playing around more with this.

‘On the Mission R I would say anything below the line around the middle of the car is purely racing. Some of those sections, like the side air intake – they’re pretty radical. Anything above this line, like the proportions, the design of the headlamps, the tail lamp, the daylight opening [glasshouse] – stuff like this is all based on Porsche’s design DNA. My favourite parts are the tail lamp – really nice – and the section to the sides of the car, which are very expressive. If you take the Taycan in the same perspective, there is already a lot of tension for a production car. I would love to see even more of this in future.’

Until then, let’s not fail to enjoy the Mission R concept for what it is: a labour of love from a company more obsessed with racing than just about any other. This much is evident in the details, from the neat active aero and a drag-reduction system to the car’s extensive use of ultra-light yet renewable materials, notably plastics reinforced with natural fibres rather than carbon. Inside, you sit within a protective module that could also be offered as an eSports simulator, blurring the lines between real racing and its online twin. Displays show video feeds behind and to the sides of the car, replacing mirrors, and a neatly integrated roof-top air vent feeds a cool breeze to your fevered brow. The steering wheel is a deadly-serious prototype- style design while a touchscreen displays your biometric read-outs, so you can see just how worryingly high your heart rate is…

Little of that lot is likely to make it to your electric Porsche Cayman. But what matters – design and engineering worthy of a true Porsche sports car – will.

Vast 911 RSR wing won’t grace your electric Cayman… Mid-engined, only the engine’s a battery Cooling is a key battleground in fast-EV development Can’t afford to race the car? Seat module also works as a simulator.

Mission R racer and our illustration of the road car it’s inspiring, the electric Cayman

DESIGN EV-LUTION

Porsche’s design boss Michael Mauer talks electrification Evolution versus revolution ‘With the Taycan we introduced certain elements that we defined as EV elements. And now with the Mission R we’re showing how these styling elements can be further developed. What are the next steps? Because some have already said, for example, that on the existing 992-generation 911 that it’s not possible to further develop the horizontal band of the tail lamp.

But we have a pretty good track record – and I believe this is part of our success – of always managing to develop our design language. You see this here. Sure, sometimes this development is evolutionary but at least we are still moving forward, and by doing this we never put ourselves in a situation where we have to make really radical changes.’

The joy of working on racecars ‘We [Porsche design] always have a good experience working with the GT team on cars like the GT3 and GT3 RS. Even on the prototype LMP cars, which are driven by functionality, we give our advice. I like the very agile development style. Their mentality is similar to ours. If one path isn’t working we have a quick discussion, make a decision and look for other solutions.’ 

MISSION R: THE INSPIRATION

CAYMAN GT4 CLUBSPORT

At the almost affordable end of Porsche’s customer racing programme sits the GT4 Clubsport, a mid-engined partsbin special that marries the best of the Cayman GT4 road car with plenty of race-derived stuff, including a plumbed-in fire extinguisher, welded-in rollcage and six-point harness. Available in full ‘competition’ and slightly more affordable ‘trackday’ specs. Mission R has a similar ethos.

935

Mission R’s aero-optimised, rotor-cooling wheels are a nod to the similar rims fitted to Porsche’s wildly successful (and much modified) motorsport-developed 911 variant, the 935 (and its modern reboot, above). Mission R also one of few cars able to eclipse Moby Dick’s power output. That car punched out 845bhp from a 3.2-litre flat-six with everything dialled up – Mission R clears 1000bhp.

VISION 920

One of several futuristic racers in Porsche’s Unseen series, the 920 donates its front wings, colour scheme and pronounced horizontal upper/lower split to the Mission R. Michael Mauer: ‘The idea [of the Unseen cars] is to let your thoughts jump to the day after tomorrow, and to then move back from there to tomorrow.’ The 920-inspired Boxster and Cayman will be along in a couple of years, not tomorrow.

919 HYBRID

Porsche’s Le Mans hybrid was ambitious and, in its early running, plagued with technical issues. But it evolved into a winning machine, and helped rapidly accelerate Porsche’s EV development. The 919 Hybrid, which won Le Mans in 2015, 2016 and 2017, blooded the 800-volt architecture the Taycan employs, and used the direct oil-cooling system Porsche plans to use in the batteries of its performance roadgoing EVs.