Porsche’s 75th birthday surprise is an EV It’ll be faster, sure, but more of an event? successor to the 918 Spyder hypercar. That’s the million dollar question...
WORDS OLLIE MARRIAGE PHOTOGRAPHY MARK RICCIONI
A car covered in a sheet. That’s what I’m looking at, but beyond that... well, it’s clearly not an SUV. Assuming it’s pointing the right way the proportions are cab forward, the front arches pronounced, the rear deck flat and wide. If I’ve got it the wrong way round, it’s Vision Gran Turismo or Hot Wheels all the way.
Normally we’d already know what lies beneath. There are very, very few genuine surprises nowadays – information and images are released to media early on the understanding we’ll abide by an embargo. But not this time: no early teasers, no leaks, nothing. All we have is rumours.
Pretty educated ones. Ones that were reinforced when we arrived on the roof of the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart to find three cars lined up in front of us – a 959, a Carrera GT and a 918 Spider. Porsche’s hypercars. A 40-year timeline of talent and technology. A proper clue. Just in case we were thinking Porsche would invite people to its 75th anniversary celebrations only to unveil some new headlights for the Macan. But what form would it take? Some voices expected a plugin hybrid. But that was the 918, there’d be no point in repeating. So it must be electric.
Oliver Blume, Porsche CEO (also CEO of the whole VW Group, effectively making him his own boss), came on stage. The show began, information drip fed on screens to pumping beats and rotating lights: a power to weight ratio of 1:1, the fastest hypercar around the Nürburgring Nordschleife, 900V charging (definitely electric then), GT3 RS-beating downforce. Juicy stuff.
The music crescendoed, the lights span red, then it went dark. And then there was the Mission X. And I didn’t know quite what to think. Unbidden, my brain sprang into action: “It’s a sludgy browny/green. Like something scooped from the bottom of a pond.” Yeah, the colour. Bit challenging. Silver has always served Porsche well, I’m not convinced Rocket Metallic is a colour that’s going to have the same longevity.
It takes me a few minutes to see past it and absorb the shape underneath. It’s relatively clean, unadorned – the downforce is obviously all going to happen underneath – but I don’t see that much Porsche in it at the moment. That’s likely to change. The Mission X, when it goes into production in maybe three to four years (we can be confident it will), is likely to have inspired the next Cayman, Boxster and Macan that s
