Has hybrid power sullied the purity of Porsche’s hallowed sports car?
Seismic, paradigm-shifting changes are rare in Porsche 911 world.Gentle evolution has been the cornerstone of the car’s era-spanning appeal, and big alterations to the recipe have been avoided in the design-engineering workshops at Weissach as well as the boardroom at Zuffenhausen. A bit of water-cooling here, a turbo or two there, rear-axle steering to counteract growth in the footprint and, all right then, a two-pedal GT3.In short, the adoption of innovation has been subtle. And yet for more than a decade one unswervable shake-up has hovered above the world’s best-loved sports car – a machine famed for its lightness, litheness and purity – like a regulation-driven sword of Damocles: electrification.That the 911 would eventually ‘go hybrid’ has long been accepted as fact. Equally accepted, and most certainly feared, has been the idea that the plumbing of electrical apparatus into an already tightly packaged chassis would add weight and trim the 911’s natural vivacity.In the 15 fleeting years since Porsche revealed the radical 911 GT3 R Hybrid racing car, with its 40,000rpm flywheel generator dumped adjacent to the driver, and raced it at the 2010 Nürburgring 24 Hours (DNF after 142 laps), we have cogitated on exactly how a hybrid road 911 might adopt electrification while minimising the drawbacks.In these intervening years, the release of the barnstorming PHEV 918 Spyder and totemic victories at Le Mans with the ultra-complex 919 Hybrid spaceship-on-wheels should have allayed reservations about an upcoming street-legal 911 hybrid, but they did no such thing. An attempt to extend the regulatory life of the flat six by electrifying the powertrain could still go wrong. An 1800kg 911 PHEV? No thanks.But now an official hybrid 911 is finally upon us, and we can say that Porsche evidently shared our concerns. Look around the body of the subject of this road test and you will see a fuel filler cap but no charge port cover, and yet this definitely is a hybrid 911, just not a heavy PHEV.The new 911 Carrera GTS, which is the model selected to introduce Porsche’s T-Hybrid (T for Turbo) technology, carries only a small battery pack and two tactically placed electric motors. The system was conceived with the goal of decreasing emissions and future-proofing the flat six while simultaneously escalating performance to levels hitherto unknown to any non-GT or Turbo-badged 911, all while not straying beyond 1600kg in full running order.This is, on paper, a rather stunning machine. What we will now discover is how well this hybrid complexity translates to the simple joy of driving and, of course, to that trademark day-to-day 911 usability.
