E for eleven

We have always known that the Porsche 911 is not just an emotional and iconic sports car, but a hybrid through and through. Somehow, at least. It's just that we understood it a little differently than those experts who are concerned with performance, power, acceleration, top speed and all that stuff. No, you just have to take the brand founder Ferry Porsche at his word. ‘The 911 is the only car in which you can drive from an African safari to Le Mans, then to the theatre and then onto the streets of New York.’

So far, so capable of development: Because Porsche is not content with what it has, but continues to work hard on the sports car of the future. The new 911, for example. Business as usual, in other words. At least for the basic 911 Carrera variant. It is still powered by a 3.0-litre boxer engine with biturbo charging - comprehensively revised, of course, and thus both more powerful and with reduced emissions. However, the 911 Carrera GTS is anything but ordinary. This is where the Zuffenhausen-based company presented the real (r)evolution: it is the first road-legal 911 with a performance hybrid.

Before the purists start screaming: No, the 911 is not plugged into a power socket, it is NOT a plug-in hybrid. The engineers at the Weissach development centre have based the concept of the so-called T-Hybrid system on findings from motorsport. Above all, this increases performance - while at the same time reducing CO2 emissions. Two electric motors ensure this. The smaller of the two, with 11 kW (15 PS), is positioned between the compressor and turbine wheel in the newly developed electric exhaust gas turbocharger, bringing the turbocharger up to speed at lightning speed. This not only increases the dynamics, but also eliminates the need for a second exhaust gas turbocharger.

In short, the new 911 is not a revolution like the transition from the 993 to the 996, from air-cooled to water-cooled, but rather a continuation of the typical Porsche philosophy that a few more horsepower is fine, but above all there must be more innovations per horsepower. And in addition to the drive system, this can also be found in the (optimised) chassis, active aerodynamics, the (fully digital) cockpit and the extended connectivity. But we'll take a closer look at that elsewhere.