How Porsche will take on the world’s fastest cars

Porsche plans to reset supercar benchmarks with an electric machine to rival the world’s fastest cars.

Porsche’s Mission X electric concept car.

This is how the legendary sports car brand will take on the world’s fastest and most expensive supercars.

The manufacturer has marked its 75th anniversary with a “Mission X” concept car that hints at a high-performance, battery-powered halo model.

Porsche’s Mission X electric concept car looks purposeful

The car shapes up as a successor to the Porsche 959, 911 GT1, Carrera GT and Porsche 918 Spyder – million dollar cars that arrived roughly once every 10 years to take aim at exotic supercars.

It would join a world of battery-powered performance cars including the Pininfarina Battista, Lotus Evija, Rimac Nevera and upcoming Tesla Roadster.

The Porsche 918 combined V8 and electric power.

Oliver Blume, chairman of the board for Porsche, said the Mission X “is a technology beacon for the sports car of the future”.

“The Mission X provides critical impetus for the evolutionary development of future vehicle concepts,” he said.

Porsche’s Mission X electric concept car has high-opening doors.

“Daring to dream and dream cars are two sides of the same coin for us: Porsche has only remained Porsche by constantly changing.”

The Mission X draws links to Porsche’s Le Mans racers with doors that swing upward. A new interior has elements that could carry over to production models, including a fresh take on high-performance seats and digital readouts.

The brown-coloured cabin has a glass roof.

A battery mounted behind the seats “provides the basis for excellent agility”, replicating the mid-engine balance of Porsche’s halo models.

It’s something Porsche experimented with using the Mission R electric concept car.

Porsche’s Mission R electric concept car is a rolling testbed for future models.

The manufacturer has not explicitly said that the Mission X will go on sale.

But it has said that “innovative concept cars have always laid the groundwork for the future”, and that “the sports car manufacturer is continuing this tradition with this latest concept study”.

The rear wheels have transparent aero disc covers.

Which, reading between the lines, suggests that it is not a flight of fancy.

Though there are no published technical specifications, Porsche said “the vision, should the Mission X go into series production, is for it to be the fastest road-legal vehicle on the Nürburgring Nordschleife”.

The Porsche Mission X electric concept car has a driver-focused cabin.

It said the car’s horsepower figure would match its weight – so a 1.5-tonne car would have a staggering 1500 horsepower, or 1118kW of punch.

Another aim is for it to take on charge at a rate double that of the Porsche Taycan, which can already accept 100 kilometres of range in less than six minutes.

Originally published as How Porsche will take on the world’s fastest cars