The Non-Electric 911 (Sort of)

The good news is Porsche has announced it will not be making a fully electric version of the 911, its iconic sports car. The bad news is hinted at by the italics. Porsche will not be making a fully electric 911. That implies Porsche will be making a partially electric 911; i.e., a hybrid 911.

It already does, in fact. For $181,100 you can buy a hybridized 911 right now. The question is whether Porsche will hybridize all 911s. The answer is, probably.

Inevitably.

That’s bad news for several reasons, the first being it’s just silly. There is no good reason to turn every 911 into a hybrid. The only good reason to hybridize any vehicle being to get the most gas mileage possible out of a vehicle that is designed chiefly to be economical. The Prius hybrid, for instance. People buy the Prius because it gets really good gas mileage. It has other good qualities, of course – but it’s the high mileage that’s the point.

Well, why do people buy high-performance sports cars?

There are many reasons why – and not one of them is because they get great gas mileage. Maybe incidentally. But not primarily. A hybrid high-performance car might get slightly better gas mileage – if it is driven in a manner conducive to getting great gas mileage (e.g., gentle acceleration, as much coasting as possible) but in that case why not just buy a Prius? Buying a sports car because of the gas mileage is something like buying a 4×4 and never or very rarely using the 4WD. Most people who buy high-performance sports cars like to drive them at more than a Prius-like pace and such driving is not conducive to great gas mileage.

The additional weight of the hybrid drivetrain equipment – at least one electric motor plus the battery pack to store the electricity to power the motor and the car’s electrically powered accessories when the engine isn’t running – is a compounding problem. If the car isn’t driven in such a way as to maximize the potential fuel-efficiency benefit of the hybrid drivetrain then the gas engine will have to work harder (and burn more gas) to lug around the additional weight.

Fundamentally, weight is what’s not wanted in a high-performance sports car. Lightness is – and not just because a lighter car tends to be a faster car than a heavier car (assuming a comparably powerful engine in both cars). Heaviness detracts from agility, which is just as wanted by most people who are interested in high-performance sports cars as athletic acceleration. Heaviness is fine in a performance car. But a performance car isn’t a sports car, irrespective of how high its performance is. The Mazda Miata is perhaps the best-known (and certainly the most successful) sports car of the past 30 years and it isn’t especially high-performance, in terms of acceleration – which is the usual barometer of “performance.” The current iteration gets to 60 in about six seconds. A Dodge Charger EV is a performance car. It can get to 60 in less than 4 seconds. No one confuses it with a sports car.

The 911 is a high-performance sports car. It accelerates as (or more) ferociously than most performance cars but it is also – fundamentally – a sports car. It weighs 3,316 lbs. A Dodge Charger EV weighs 5,838 lbs. How much more does the hybrid 911 weigh? Not as much as a Charger EV, but it is about 200 pounds heavier than its engine-only siblings. Several hundred pounds added to a sports car amounts to something like what an extra 20 pounds does to the belly of a supermodel.

It’s not generally what’s wanted, in either case.

There’s more power, of course – which is what Porsche tries to sell for the roughly $35k more you’ll pay to get into the hybrid 911 vs. the standard model. But the extra power/performance is a kind of compliance consolation prize – and a harbinger, too. Of what’s to come.

Of what’s being forced.

Porsche has to please both its customers and placate the government. Not so much the government of this country but the government that runs Germany. It is like the government that ran this country when Biden was president and Michael Regan was ensconced at the EPA. The German government hasn’t let up on the push to “electrify” everything on wheels; it has increased the pushiness of the push, via ever-more-onerous demands that carbon dioxide “emissions” be reduced to next-to-none (on the way to none, which cannot be done if an engine is involved, at all). By shutting off the engine as often as feasible, CO2 “emissions” are reduced and the government is placated. That is why Porsche is resorting to hybrid drivetrains in cars like the 911 that need to be hybridized like a porpoise needs a top hat.

Porsche will, of course, try to market the best of it – by hyping up the increased power of the hybrid drivetrain. But when all is said and done, it is not something clamored for by the market – by most of the people who buy 911. It is – fundamentally – something resorted to by Porsche as a compliance measure. That is bad all by itself – because it is always bad when the market is thwarted or misdirected by the government. What’s worse is something Porsche – and it is not just Porsche – appears not to understand. Which is that by complying, you only assure more onerous demands for further compliance in the future.

The German government has made it clear it wants Porsche – and it is not just Porsche – to stop making 911s with engines, period. Hybrids are inevitably not going to be enough. The German government is just pushing Porsche in the all-electric direction one small step at a time.  If Porsche doesn’t say (best Arnold voice, now) To Hell with you – then Porsche (and BMW and Mercedes and VW and Audi, too) will eventually become just another seller of devices that look like cars – and there’s ultimately not much of a market for that.

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