Holier than thou
Ignore the drone in the boot – Porsche’s EV is practically production-ready
The Porsche Mission E Cross Turismo, Jaguar I-Pace and Rimac C_Two have electric halos
Windscreen wipers. Actual wing mirrors. Somewhere you could conceivably mount a number plate. Leaving of these tedious details is an easy shortcut to building glamour into a concept car. But their presence signifes something that’s actually more exciting. They mean this Mission E Cross Turismo isn’t just eye candy for a podium but close to something you’ll see on actual roads. Not that this is exactly a production machine. A little decoding is necessary.
Michael Mauer, Porsche design guru, tells TG: “The proportions and dimensions give you a hint: this is more realistic than the frst Mission E concept.” That means the bodywork and interior are pretty much as per the production Mission-E saloon, launching next year.
Then he adds, “This concept also shows possibilities of the future line-up.” So they’re already planning a range of Mission-E bodies, and this shooting-brake-esque roof and tailgate are for the second model. Just like the Panamera spawned the Sport Turismo.
Finally there’s this Cross business. That’s the slightly raised ride height, the chunky tyres and the body armour around the arches. Here the messaging really does start to get a bit convoluted. Does the beautiful and pure idea of the Mission E really need to be turned into, what, a Mission E Allroad? A Mission E Streetwise? Whether a production electric Porsche would actually get the Cross treatment, or whether this bit really is just a bit of motorshow fun, isn’t yet clear. But Mauer stresses what we already know: that Porsche sees big business in crossing over. “That’s where Porsche is now, and we’ll get stronger in that direction.” Peter Varga, Porsche’s exterior design director, has more to say about the body protection parts. “It was important to me to have a light look, a Porsche look. Of-road cars usually look heavy. So we didn’t close the wheelarch trim onto the sill. It’s more like the foating aero of a GT3 car.”
The Cross Turismo Concept is a runner, using the same electrical and mechanical set-up as the frst Mission E, due out next year. That means front and rear electric motors, good for 0–62mph in 3.5secs and 0–125 in 12. It’ll do those blazing numbers, even when the battery is fairly depleted – a condition not met by a Tesla. Its range is just over 300 miles, when driven with the sloth of a EU-cycle tester, but that’ll
be signifcantly eroded if you drive like a Porsche owner. But Europe’s upcoming network of superfast chargers should diminish that issue.
The Mission E doesn’t only have the performance of a Porsche, it has the looks of one. OK, compared with the 2015 show car, the Rubenesque hips have been lost and the suicide doors too, but it still has Mauer’s touchstones of Porsche DNA: “the low bonnet and raised wings, the tapering roof, the rear shoulder and the tail lamp band”. But just as other Porsches have their own particular characteristics – only the 911 has round headlights – Mauer’s team is drawing up some specifc cues for the electric cars. “Airfow is important for this type of car so we make a feature of it.” As the motor and battery need a lot of cooling, one solution would have been to cover the wheelarches, but Mauer didn’t like that idea – “You have to see the wheels on a sports car, so we have air curtains around the front wheels – the headlamp is more like an air intake with the headlamp within it.”
Proportions, of course, are critical. They’re hard to read here because of the ‘Cross’ paraphernalia of body cladding and lumpy tyres, but actually the body is shallow from foor to roof, and wide. Mauer says that’s critical. “Porsches need dramatic proportions. In an EV, you have the battery in the foor for driving dynamics, but you need to package the people on top. That drives the height of the car. This is a big, big challenge. It would’ve been easier to have done a conventional tall SUV.”
“Inside, it’s a combination of the new and old worlds,” says Mauer. So you get the wide, oval Porsche instrument pod, but it’s a thin curved screen. Apart from the steering wheel and stalks, all switches, even the windows, are on glass touch panels. There’s no carpet to be seen. The cabin is full of ‘foating’ elements, in search of an impression of lightness. Interior design chief Ivo van Hulten calls these parts – wheel spokes, armrests, console – ‘satellites’. The air vents have no blades. Instead, electrostatic wings control the air direction upstream of the outlets.
“There is an HUD,” says van Hulten, “but you don’t have that visible hole in the dash where the projector usually is. We’ve covered it in fne mesh, and the image projects through.”
“The dash layout and cockpit is relatively feasible,” he says. “That’s the message we want to send.” In the coy language of concept-car designers, you seldom get a clearer signal than that.
The seats aren’t so production-ready. They’ll need to bulk up because of mundane production stuf like crash strengthening and side airbags. Neither can you expect any time soon for your Porsche car to arrive with a Porsche drone in the boot. But Van Hulten explains that the designers at Porsche’s Weissach studio don’t just do cars any more. They try to understand the whole of life-with-Porsche. In the jargon, the ownership experience. So they reckon Porsche’s servers could fnd you a scenic route, send it to the car’s nav, and suggest stopovers where you’d launch the drone which would follow the car as you drive, sharing the footage to your friends who also inhabit this curated Porsche world.
It’s indicative of a major shift to new business worlds for the company. Porsche now means electricity, crossovers, digitisation, connectedness, sharing. It’s a long way from the solitude of tearing up an empty mountain road in a 911. And you can be sure they mean it. This concept has fantastical details but overall it’s much more than just a fantasy. Says Mauer, “Our unique position is that if we do a concept and it comes to production, it doesn’t look so diferent. As a designer, of course, I’d love to do an even more radical concept. But this is better for our credibility.”
“This is a big, big challenge. It would’ve been easier to have done an SUV”