Yahoo Autos The Perfect Plug-In Hybrid Performance Car Exists. It Just Costs $232,000.
While I understand the appeal of road tripping a supercar in theory, I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and more than once, I’ve required doctors appointments to repair myself afterwards. When you’ve driven as much as I have, a road trip, even one with curves in it, deserves a grand touring car. And on the Road & Track Smoky 600, I didn’t just find a great touring car, I gave myself a mission.
Though it has an ample-sized back seat and four doors, the Porsche Panamera is an excellent GT car. It’s low, it’s wide, and it’s unquestionably sporting given its size. And the best of the breed is the Turbo S e-Hybrid, featuring not only a twin-turbo V8, but also an electric motor and battery which, combined, unleash 689 horsepower and 641 lb-ft of torque. I reviewed one a few years ago back when it came out, and in the spectrum of “incredible vehicles no one really talks about anymore” this is right at the top.
Clocking 0-60 in 2.6 seconds, the quarter mile in 10.9 and a top speed of 196 mph in a car that can also drive 35 miles on electric-only power and carry four people and their luggage comfortably over very long distances? Shove all of that in my face, right now.
Now, the mission: could I not only drive, but lead a group of 22 car enthusiasts in sports cars over a 600-mile road trip, at a pace befitting Road & Track’s good name, while achieving over 30 cumulative miles per gallon, and without anyone noticing that I was doing my own little efficiency challenge. Why 30 mpg? Honestly, it just seemed like a nice, round number. It also exceeds Porsche’s own “combined” rating of 20 mpg by 50%.
If you ask Porsche, the key to conserving energy is coasting. The all-electric Taycan eschews the popular “one-pedal driving” feature found in Teslas and other EVs because they believe that energy-free coasting is more efficient than regenerating electricity using the motors every time you lift off the pedal. While I enjoy one-pedal driving very much in my electric Ford, I have to believe Porsche is acting in good faith with its bet on coasting. And this bet extends to its less popular but still excellent hybrid variants of the Cayenne and Panamera, which don’t just coast on EV mode, but frequently decouple and shut off the gas engine when it’s not needed, for maximum total efficiency.
Porsche PR guru Calvin Kim informs me that the company's own "Hybrid” setting is the most efficient way to drive the car for most occasions, and the car will be vastly more efficient if I start each day with a full charge, meaning I will have to find a Level 2 AC charger in each city we stay overnight - this would be easier said than done, particularly as none of our three hotels even had their own onsite parking lots.
Common sense also tells you that acceleration is also inefficient. In order to avoid accelerating too much, I needed to avoid decelerating too much. This means maximum cornering speed at all times. Having track-tested this car on the press launch a few years ago, this would not be problem at all.
I began with a full charge at NCM Motorsports Park. While our guests lapped the track and competed in an autocross challenge in a C8 Corvette, the Panamera sat plugged into an RV shore power post so I would leave maximally full.
Using Porsche’s Hybrid setting is, as Porsche pointed out, the most efficient way to drive in this vehicle. However, it will, over the course of about 150-200 miles, drain the battery. Because it is a hybrid you can keep going indefinitely, but this means your first 150 miles are much more efficient than anything that follows. The car also has a “charge” mode in which it will overload the gas engine to put positive charge into the battery. (Sport+ setting will also do this.) The mode is great if you know you want to drive in pure electric power at some point later, but it is not the most efficient method overall. Hybrid, full charge each day, and light on the throttle with maximum cornering inertia. That’s it.
It was only about 120 miles to our first overnight in Louisville, Kentucky - optimal for efficiency, and I gloated to myself at the 42 mpg average I achieved, thinking how easy this challenge would be. As luck would have it, the parking lot adjacent to the hotel did have a charger, and I powered up the 9.4kWh battery in about 2.5 hours. Yachtzee!
As the following day would be focused on touring Bourbon distilleries for our guests, the drive leg to Lexington was also relatively short. Kentucky is beautiful in the summer, with lush, dense, green forests, rolling farmlands, and for the big Panamera, lots of big, fast sweeping corners. Not too much need for brakes. Even at a quicker clip than the previous day, I landed our group at the 21C Museum Hotel in Lexington with 38.9 MPG displayed on the dash. I was still magnificently confident, and one guest even commented to me that he “hardly saw [my] brake lights come on during that drive!”
Lexington, considering the state it's in, is a shockingly progressive city. There are pride flags all over downtown, posters in business windows saying things like “Immigrants are welcome here,” and young, stylish people having coffee and drinking craft cocktails all over. The food is on par with what you’d find in parts of Los Angeles or New York.
But it still hasn’t quite caught up on electric cars. There are only a few EV chargers in downtown Lexington. Fortunately, one lonely ChargePoint (outside the police station) was within a mile of the hotel. I used the last mile on my battery to gently nudge the car over there, and left it parked while I hit the hotel gym, going back for it a few hours later.
The third day’s drive would be the real challenge; it was nearly 300 miles, and though there was an hour long lunch stop at a (delicious) BBQ joint halfway to Knoxville, no chargers. Plus, the road would get even tighter, even more hilly, and even more exciting.
The roads on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee are just fantastically good. Considering the fact these states have four seasons to contend with and considering Kentucky is ranked 45th out of 50 for “Fiscal Stability” by US News, its tarmac quality is shocking. Smooth, even, and well maintained, these roads are an overlooked paradise for a grand tour.
The hills, the tight corners, and the length of the drive meant that I’d drained my battery by lunchtime, with nowhere to charge for the remainder of the drive. The second half of the day, for the first time, I was going old-school. And though I was comfortable as ever in the 18-way adaptive, cooled driver’s seat, my average fuel economy gauge was dropping, fast.
We arrived at the Oliver Hotel in Knoxville, and fortunately, a commuter parking garage about a quarter of a mile away did have city-owned (free) chargers. They were occupied when I arrived, so I parked the Porsche across the aisle with the total average economy showing 28.8 mpg. I checked into my hotel, took a long walk, and planned to go back after dinner. Knoxville is a charming town, with great shopping, excellent restaurants, at least one fantastic craft distillery, and plenty to do on foot.
After dinner the charger had opened up, so I took the opportunity to be “that guy,” who only needed 2.5 hours of charge but left the thing plugged in overnight. In my own defense, the adjacent charger was also open, both when I left the car and when I came back for it the next morning. Hopefully I didn’t inconvenience anyone else through the night.
The last leg of our drive would depart south from Knoxville on TN-129, the road known globally to enthusiasts as “The Tail of the Dragon,” and boasts 311 corners in 13 miles. That’s just the famous section -- the 40 miles leading up to the Dragon are also great, and the subsequent 50 miles I would do on the Cherohala Skyway are even better.
Walking back to the car in the morning, I had a thought. I really wanted to win the game that I made up. No one on this whole drive knew that I was doing anything related to efficiency. The pace was acceptable, and I had found charging, for the most part, where I needed it. But here I was, under my 30 mpg goal, and in order to somehow achieve this, I would have to do some crazy hypermiling on one of the best stretches of tarmac in the entire United States. That would, frankly, suck, and it might not even work.
I wanted to have fun too! The whole point of a car like the Panamera Turbo S e-Hybrid is the breadth of its skill set, right? It can be efficient, or it can be very fast! Obviously, because of physics, it can’t be both at the same time, but someone who spends $232,000 on a Porsche super-sedan doesn’t need everything at once all the time.
Since this was a made-up game I was determined to win, I moved the goalposts a little bit. I decided that the “end of the drive” in which I wanted to be at 30 mpg would be at our photo stop at the very beginning of Tail of the Dragon. That way, if I made it, I could declare victory, and still have fun.
I flicked the drive mode selector on the steering wheel from “Hybrid” to “E-Power” and, with a full battery, cruised smoothly silent, without burning a drop of fuel, to the photo stop, where the battery indicator showed one mile of electricity remaining.
I traveled 463 miles at an average of 48 miles an hour, and burned 30.3 miles per gallon. Now, it was time to have fun.
I flicked the drive mode selector to Sport+, for maximum performance from the hybrid powertrain. Then it was manual mode for the PDK gearbox, and we were off. Though the Panamera is a much bigger car than would be optimal for such a road--311 corners in 11 miles is the realm of the Miata, the S2000, the Boxster--all the technology crammed into this thing does help. The rear steering seems to shrink the wheelbase in the tight bends. The fast steering ratio minimizes excessive hand-over-hand action, and the torque from the electric motors fills in all the gaps in power left behind by twin-turbocharging. Frankly, for the last third of the Dragon, I got a bit of a headache from all the back and forth.
The Cherohala Skyway is different. This is my kind of road. Similar in shape and scope to the Angeles Crest Highway in Los Angeles, it’s more open, much much faster, banked on camber, and with enormous views of the green valleys below. Not that one legally should, but one easily could sustain 60-80 mph through the whole entire road. Finally I could lean into the Panamera’s giant power curve a little bit for more than an eye blink. Finally I could lean on the ceramic brakes once in a while, and between a spat of each, I could load up the Pirelli P-Zero tires for seconds at a time. The pace this car can carry is simply astonishing, and every bit a Porsche. Funny enough, Sport+ drive mode is charge-positive, meaning it adds more to the battery than it takes away.
By the time we reached the end of the Skyway in Tellico Plains, TN, I had a full battery again.
There is, put simply, nothing bad about this car. It is nearly perfect, and for $232,000, it had better be. It can run on electricity when that’s useful. It can burn loads of hydrocarbons when that’s useful. It can do a bit of both if you need it to. It is probably the best “only car” on sale today. One car to rule them all, if you will.
And even if you want to drive maximally efficiently, just don’t use the brakes in the corners. I promise, no one will notice you hypermiling.
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