2020 Porsche EV Sedan: More 918 than Panamera

The engineers in Weissach can take only some of the credit for Porsche’s forthcoming EV; Palo Alto needs to be thanked as well. While luxury automakers officially like to pretend that Tesla exists in a parallel universe, the ability of this electric upstart to lure affluent buyers has been causing plenty of banged fists on German boardroom tables. Elon Musk should be flattered by Porsche’s decision to go straight after his company’s Model S.

The seriousness with which Porsche is taking this new endeavor is marked by the fact it has broken a long-held vow of silence about future model plans to confirm that, yes, it is indeed working on a production battery-electric sedan. And it is investing more than $750 million on the development of electron-fueled models and the 1000 new workers to build them. That’s a sizable stake to be putting on the table and clear evidence of Porsche’s determination to win.

Not that we should expect the production car to be a license-plate-wearing facsimile of the Mission E concept (above) that introduced us to the idea at last year’s Frankfurt show. That car had plenty of the usual show-stand tease, including that favorite concept-car ­cliché of suicide doors, plus controls that can react to facial expressions, and the promise of projected hologram interfaces. But Porsche is also intent on us knowing that the technology underpinning the Mission E is all viable, including high-output electric motors and the ultrafast charging system. It uses an 800-volt feed to juice the batteries back to 80 percent of the claimed 311-mile range in just 15 minutes.

The production Mission E will be built in Weissach on a dedicated line that’s been dubbed Factory 4.0, meaning no direct link to any other Porsche. So it won’t be a Panamera EV, although Panampera has a nice ring to it. The biggest risk here remains the rate of change in this segment. The headline spec for a 600-hp car that Porsche is aiming to introduce in four years—a 3.5-second zero-to-62-mph time—is already inferior to the perform­ance of the latest Model S P90D that Tesla is selling now.

That’s a lot of catching up to do.

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