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Porsche Unveils Its First Electric Car
An anonymous reader writes: German automaker Porsche has made its first foray into electric vehicles. On Monday at the Frankfurt Auto Show, it unveiled a concept car called the Porsche Mission E. Its 800-volt drive system can take the car from 0 to 100km/h in 3.5 seconds. The high-voltage charging system lets it gain 80% of its battery capacity back within 15 minutes. They claim a driving range of 500km on a single battery charge. Porsche said the car was not a response to the Tesla Model S, but the two will likely be direct competitors when the Mission E goes into full production. That will happen "within the next five years."
Zero to production in five years. Yay.
One of the first cars Dr Ferdinand Porsche designed was electric, had motors on all 4 wheels.
His son Ferry is the Porsche car maker we all know... and did the 356.
But for the cost of a high end rebuild on a 356 engine, you can convert them to electric. Same conversion should owrk on any model with the 200mm clutch - 356, 912, 914 - as well as later (post '64 IIRC) VW bugs and busses.
http://www.evwest.com/catalog/...
Also, I thought the 918 Spyder was electric?
Finally, Saturday is the 19th - not just Talk Like a Pirate Day, it is Ferry Porsche's birthday and Drive Your Porsche Day.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
This is NOT their first electric car by a long shot
http://www.history.com/news/fe...
Assuming it launches for a similar price range, it can't compete with a Model S now, much less in the next five years. Next year the supercharger network will blanket the US and they'll have two attractive (/expensive) models to choose from. In 2018 they'll have a $35k everyman's car to compete with the LEAF and Volt. How is Porsche going to compete? If this came out a year ago maybe it could rely on it's brand but Tesla is quickly becoming the Apple of cars (not entirely a good thing). Talk about dead on arrival.
Big deal. Porsche is unveiling a prototype of a car that can compete with what Tesla has been doing for a few years. That's great, except that Tesla is a moving target. If Porsche wants to get some excitement going, they need to put out something that will compete with where Tesla will be in a few years when this thing actually makes it into production.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I just can't seem to find the expected price tag. Whoops. I forgot, if you need to ask the price of a Porsche, you cannot afford it.
Personally, I'm vastly more excited about an affordable Tesla than some horrifically expensive EV Porsche.
A number of people (myself included) have known for decades (and somtimes brought to the attention of auto company executives that electric cars could be capable of performance far better than fuel-driven engines and limited only by the traction of the tires, and that people might want lectric vehicles with sane levels of performance.
But the auto execs only thought of electric vehicles as appealing to eco-freaks, who would be willing to accept - and might desire - classic VW levels of performance. So when they designed electric "concept cars" they didn't do the engineering to achieve performance. Their offerings were traffic-snarling, short-range, wimpy eco-freak commuter cars.
This left the market SO open that Elon Musk (who also understood the demand) was able to build a successful new auto company from scratch (a couple billion dollars worth) and capture the market.
Musk started with the high end - to recover the development cost from the early adopters willing to pay big for the new toy - in classic Silicon Valley style. He's working his way down from the pricey prestige cars to the bulk market as fast as his engineers can bring the cost down and his financing can build the manufacturing infrastructure (and his lawyers and lobbyists can remove the legal obstacles to his not-dealer-dependent marketing).
But now the PARTIAL lesson - that there's a market at the top for a high-performance electric car - has been learned, and a prestige auto maker is trying to get a slice of that.
They're STILL not seeing the whole picture. Which is very good for Tesla. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"The high-voltage charging system lets it gain 80% of its battery capacity back within 15 minutes. "
Don't they have any marketing slime in their company?
Why don't they just add another 20% to the battery, then they can claim that it will be _fully_ recharged after 15 minutes?
Later people will notice that if you let it stay longer on the charger, they will even get 120% of the capacity.
It would be a win/win.
This is Porsche's first foray into vapourware.
The "defroster" on the original VW Beetle has this beat by many decades, we are still waiting for the one that works.