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."

Comments

Fast

[Anonymous Coward]

Zero to production in five years. Yay.

Re:Fast

[tnk1]

Which is pretty sweet, and exactly what Tesla wants.

Tesla wants the competition in the market. They won't be able to put enough money together to make electric cars into the "new normal" by themselves. For that, they need a lot of competitors who are producing enough volume to make EVs something that you see everywhere.

Once it hits a certain tipping point, the market will start supporting EVs as more than just toys. At that point, the goal of mass adoption could turn EVs into a replacement for gasoline vehicles which means that now Tesla makes more money due to increased volume over all. And being the owner of a great deal of production capacity for these sorts of vehicles, this means they have a head start on everyone else.

It won't be enough to make Tesla completely dominant in the EV market, but it could propel them into a top spot in a New Electric Vehicle Order. More to the point, it would turn them into a real honest to goodness car company, and not just an expensive vanity project.

Or to put it more succinctly, a rising tide lifts all ships. Any work that anyone does to support EVs or dedicate production capacity to EVs will help Tesla out too. Just like they're helping out everyone else by releasing their patents and building infrastructure.

EV conversion

[i.r.id10t]

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.

Re:EV conversion

[Type44Q]

His son Ferry is the Porsche car maker we all know... and did the 356.

His grandson Ferdinand Piech is the Porsche car maker we all should know... and did the 240mph 917/30, the Quattro (amen) and the Bugatti Veyron. Hell, he even designed the most reliable and indestructible engine ever put in a passenger car (the Mercedes turbo-charged five-cylinder). These may be among the reasons that it was he (and not his father or grandfather) who won Car Executive of the Century.

Wrong headline

[Anonymous Coward]

This is NOT their first electric car by a long shot
http://www.history.com/news/fe...

Pity the big auto companies were so blind.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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-)

Re:Pity the big auto companies were so blind.

[AaronW]

I agree. I own a Tesla model S P85 (for 2 1/2 years now). Tesla brings a lot more to the table than just the car. They also have a nation-wide charging network that nobody else comes close to. Next week I will be driving from the SF Bay Area to Seattle, WA. I plan to take a leisurely drive, stopping in Grants Pass for the night. On my drive to Grants Pass I will spend less than 90 minutes charging out of about 8 hours of driving. Given how most superchargers are near malls and other amenities I've found that often I grab something to eat and my car is fully charged before I am.

Besides the charging network, Tesla is also addressing the battery supply with their gigafactory, which should significantly reduce the cost of their batteries. On top of that they're also offsetting their superchargers with solar power and are now starting to add grid battery storage as well to significantly cut peak power usage.

Nobody else comes anywhere close. Their service and support has been excellent, though I've also heard that Porsche is also quite good. Even though my car was one of the early ones manufactured (VIN in the low 5000s) I've had very few problems and no major problems. Most were just squeaks and rattles, which they quickly fixed. They've also made very rapid improvements to the car in the 2 1/2 years since I bought mine. It may look the same on the outside, but there are a lot of new features under the hood and Tesla has addressed problems quickly in their production run, not waiting for 6-month or yearly intervals like many manufacturers.