Yahoo Autos Porsche's Mission X Electric Supercar Concept Leads to a Brighter Future
Once a decade, Porsche slides the silk sheet off a concept vehicle that suggests a new technological paradigm and a higher performance echelon. While the company had never confirmed the production versions were imminent, you could have set your chronograph by the arrivals of the Carrera GT (2003) and 918 Spyder (2013) three years after an earthshaking show car laid the groundwork. (The 959 showed up in production trim in 1985, two years after the radical Gruppe B prototype introduced it.) Take that as you wish while digging into the Porsche Mission X concept.
This story originally appeared in Volume 20 of Road & Track.
No promises, but it’s been 10 years—give or take a pandemic—since the 918, and the all-electric Mission X looks suitably buttoned up, even if the real mysteries lie under its taut skin: secret battery packs, transmission strategy, suspension links, and underbody aero channels down there like Atlantis, with only a splitter and a truly gargantuan rear diffuser to examine for clues. Then there are the objectives laid out by Porsche: the quickest road-legal vehicle around the Nürburgring Nordschleife and a power-to-weight ratio of one metric horsepower per kilogram. Gauntlet, meet floor.
“We don’t just do sculpture,” says Michael Behr, technical manager for the Porsche Mission X. “We are doing a car with all the calculations behind it, as if we would develop a real car, a production car. Then we can say, ‘It’s not a dream. It really can look like this.’ It’s made up to be producible.” From your lips to Porsche CEO Oliver Blume’s ears, Herr Behr.
Behr, who also worked on the Carrera GT and the 918 Spyder, says the Mission X shares a footprint with those cars. “With the 918, we started with 2680 millimeters in wheelbase and coincidentally changed to the same as the Carrera GT, 2730 millimeters, because we had to add some length at the rear,” Behr recalls. Now, for the Mission X, it’s a playful way to connect the concept with Porsche’s past hypercars: “I said to our design colleagues, ‘Let’s do 2730 millimeters so it’s the same.’ It’s ridiculous, but it’s also a little bit of Porsche DNA.”
While not confirming the prototype will make it into production, which would make the Mission X the company’s first all-electric hypercar, Porsche has served up some tantalizing details, as if we didn’t know something is afoot in Weissach.
Breaking The Record
To become the quickest road-legal vehicle around the Nürburgring Nordschleife, a title no pure EV has yet attained, the Mission X would need to beat the Mercedes-AMG One’s lap time of 6:35.183 (an asterisk here, since the One won’t be street-legal in North America) while slotting in behind the high-downforce Porsche 919 Evo hybrid race car’s overall lap record of 5:19.546. As a plug-in hybrid, the One combines a turbocharged 1.6-liter V-6 gasoline engine with several electric motors: three for motive force (one at the crankshaft, two at the front axle) and a fourth coupled to the turbocharger. That system produces 1049 hp. The Mission X would have to best the One’s performance without the backup of an engine.
“It was really interesting to calculate and simulate the Nürburgring,” Behr says. “We played with all of these factors: weight, grip and stiffness of the tires, downforce, drag, power. You have to find the right compromise, but after a short while, we realized the real thing is downforce. For the Nürburgring, if there’s a lot of power on the car, you have to optimize downforce. We don’t get the numbers of the 919, sure. It’s not a racing car; it’s a street-legal car, so it’s a completely different number, much better than the GT3 RS.”
That massive rear channel directing air under the wing will have a major role in sticking the Mission X to the ground. The concept also has an active front wing and an extendable rear wing.
Another discovery engineers made while running Nürburgring lap-time simulations with the Mission X, Behr says, is that the record can be achieved using rear-wheel drive, as the concept is currently configured. “To have a very fast lap time, the front axle is not an advantage,” he says. It’s not better in handling, “just more weight, but if we would like to have two, three, or three and a half laps with really fast lap times—much better than the 918—you have to have a big electric motor on the front axle to recuperate all the energy you need. If ever an all-electric hyper–sports car will come, I think, it will get all-wheel drive.”
Porsche engineers have also focused on mitigating the weight disadvantage of EV battery packs. The Mission X’s 900-volt system architecture, which allows it to charge its batteries nearly twice as fast as the Taycan Turbo S, also lets Porsche reduce copper weight. “The main reason to get to a higher-voltage system is to have less copper in the car, to have smaller connections and save weight,” Behr says. “Or you have the same copper, so they have the same connections, the same thickness of the connections. Then you have more power in charging, more power in driving, and more power at recuperation at the same weight.”
Other weight savings are more incremental. “We talked about saving weight at the rear axle with smaller discs, smaller calipers,” Behr says. Recuperation produces a lot of braking force, and the Mission X marked the first time the team considered taking advantage of a car’s all-electric nature to cut mass by reducing brakes. “On a Taycan, for example, they’re the same brakes as would be with a combustion engine,” he notes.
New Luxury
“In forming the design, we considered the idea of a highly luxurious hypercar,” says Ingo Scheinhütte, exterior designer for the Mission X. “An electric powertrain is a natural fit for the idea of a modern, luxurious interpretation of a hypercar—the effortless surge of power that the driver feels under even minimal throttle, only to make a complete transformation on a racetrack, where aerodynamics, an advanced chassis, and immediate power create an incredibly potent experience.”
Another way Porsche designers are signaling the Mission X’s refinement is through color. “Our hypercar concepts in the past,” Scheinhütte says, “typically featured either a very conservative paint choice like silver, as you saw on the 918 Spyder concept study, or a reference to a famous race livery, as in the 917 Living Legend. It’s unusual to use a brown hue”—dubbed Rocket Metallic—“to envision a hypercar, but we felt the warmth it creates was a good match to the notion of a highly luxurious hypercar. The same is true of the interior. Traditionally, our most track-capable models have spartan interior finishes, usually black and totally minimal. But in this case, the interior has a richer color tone with a mix of brown and gray that looks and feels luxurious.”
The Mission X shares an exoskeleton roof structure with the Mission R concept. “With this structure,” Scheinhütte says, “we were able to reduce the overall height of the Mission R by 20 millimeters while offering the same space in the interior. So we decided to use the same principle on the Mission X. It helped accommodate the upward-swinging Le Mans–style door concept, where the doors cut into the roof to make the entrance and exit to the car easier. The design incorporates a hood and front fenders that almost appear to float separately from the passenger cell. From an overhead view, you can see where the two elements of the car come together, but depending on the angle, it almost appears that these are two separate structures.”
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