In 2022, Porsche made a bold proclamation: By 2030, 80% of its total sales would be electric. Yes, the heritage manufacturer of some of the planet’s most widely coveted sports cars was going (almost) all-in on EVs. I was excited after driving many of the company’s early EV efforts, including the four-door Taycan and an early prototype of Porsche’s all-electric racer, the track-only GT4 ePerformance.
Sadly, though, we are going to have to be patient. Porsche backed off those timelines in July of this year, saying it would react more cautiously to consumer demand rather than boldly forge ahead with progressive timelines.
At this year’s Monterey Car Week, a series of events worshiping the greatest in performance cars past and present, I sat down with Porsche North America’s new CEO, Timo Resch, to ask the biggest question on my mind: Why slow down on EVs?
Embracing Choice
Resch’s answer was equal parts predictable and understandable: the American market isn’t quite ready, so Porsche is going to keep covering its bases. “As a brand, we are best advised to always offer choice,” he told me. “I think that in this current market that’s really what is needed: more choice for customers with different variations so that they can really pick and choose.”
Resch pointed to everything from inconsistent charger deployments to uneven consumer demand while making the case for why Porsche needed to soften its goals.
So, what does that mean? The company’s all-electric Macan SUV is hitting dealerships soon, but the internal combustion version of the SUV will also be available “for the foreseeable future,” Resch said.
The company is also on track to deploy its all-electric successor to the 718 Boxster and Cayman, a production version of the prototype GT4 ePerformance I drove in 2024.
But the company’s hybrids will continue to play a big part, spreading into ever more models as Porsche (and the rest of the industry) tries to convince skeptical buyers they need more electric motors in their lives.
High-Performance Hybrids
Porsche has been making hybrid variants of its four-door cars since 2010, starting with its biggest SUV, the Cayenne. It’s offered various implementations of hybrid technology over the years, some simple and some more complex, including ever-bigger batteries and plugs enabling some amount of emissions-free driving in many of its models.
However, the company’s most interesting hybrid, and surely its most controversial, is the upcoming 911 GTS. Yes, the new 911 is a hybrid, and while I’m sure that statement will make many of you recoil, bear with me because this is among the most raucous of the company’s current offerings.
Traditionally, hybrid systems are there to increase fuel economy. The basic idea is to add an electric motor and a battery to a regular car that burns fuel in a regular way. Under braking, the car can use that electric motor to harvest momentum, convert that to electricity, and shove the resulting electrons into the battery.
Then, when it comes time to accelerate again, the process reverts. The battery discharges that power back to the electric motor and helps to accelerate the car. This not only saves fuel by reducing the engine demand, but it also reduces the amount of work on the brakes, making for a more efficient car overall.
It’s safe to say that most drivers of 911s aren’t particularly interested in fuel economy. However, they should be interested in efficiency. Racing is all about efficiency, after all.
The new GTS uses a fairly straightforward hybrid configuration on paper, with a 53-horsepower electric motor paired with a 3.6-liter flat-six engine. The total system power is 532 horsepower and 449 pound-feet of torque. That’s enough to launch the car from a standstill to 60 miles per hour in 2.9 seconds, 0.2 seconds faster than the old, non-hybrid GTS.
So the good news is already starting, and while the GTS is not a plug-in, and so cannot be driven for miles and miles emissions-free, it does have another trick up its system.
A Hybrid Turbocharger
An electric motor in a car won’t do you much good without a high-voltage battery to power it. Having a high-voltage battery means Porsche’s engineers could get creative with some other performance-minded solutions to the problems that nag many modern, turbocharged sports cars.
One of the most annoying issues is turbo lag and the resulting poor throttle response. When you put your foot on the floor and nothing happens for a moment or two, that’s turbo lag. This happens because a turbocharger is literally a little fan spun by the exhaust gasses generated by internal combustion. That fan has momentum to overcome, so it takes time to get spinning quickly enough to generate power.
Porsche’s high-voltage solution was to split the turbocharger and put another electric motor right in the middle of it. In the new 911 GTS, when you put your foot to the floor the electric motor immediately zings the turbocharger up to a high RPM. Once spinning, it can immediately start to add power to the equation, making the car accelerate.
The result is a car with a smaller-displacement engine with a big turbo and no lag, and it’s only possible thanks to that high-voltage hybrid system. Throttle response is near-instantaneous, so sharp that I kept kicking the tail out repeatedly when I was wheeling one around Spain at the car’s recent launch. The power comes on so suddenly and abruptly that I had to recalibrate my right foot.
The GTS is equally good on track. That quick application of power made for thrilling exits from the slower, tighter corners at the Ascari Circuit in Málaga, Spain. However, that turbocharger still delivered huge power down the long, fast straights as we approached the car’s top speed of 194 mph.
An Electrifying Success
So, the first hybrid 911 is a remarkable thing, but there are some compromises. To start, the new 911 GTS weighs 103 pounds more than the old one. I hate to see any sports car get heavier, but Porsche’s engineers went to great lengths to keep that weight gain relatively low. Compared to the hundreds of pounds that plug-in sports cars from Mercedes-Benz and BMW are gaining, the 911’s gain here is quite slim, and the additional horsepower and acceleration help further salve the wound.
The other slight bummer is the extra complexity involved. While hybrids add efficiency, they also add many more components to an already complicated modern automobile, further increasing the likelihood of something going wrong. Compared to the beautiful simplicity of electric cars, plus the complete absence of routine maintenance that comes with them, that is a bit of a shame.
But that will come in time. Porsche’s all-electric Macan SUV is a firecracker, and its upcoming battery-powered 718 should be an absolute riot. Hopefully, they’ll continue to convert the masses, paving the way for an eventual all-electric 911.
