Porsche Mission X hypercar not likely for Australian roads

Porsche’s next hypercar previewed by the wild Mission X concept will be an all-electric, all-wheel drive, record-breaking apex predator, but it’s not likely to be built in right-hand drive and might end up with a range of less than 100km…

While few concrete details are known about the enigmatic hypercar, new intel suggests it’s unlikely to travel beyond 100km before requiring a recharge when piloted by elite drivers in full attack mode.

In Melbourne for the Australian F1 Grand Prix last week, project leader Michael Behr explained that to achieve three laps around the 20.8km-long Nordschleife northern loop at the Nurburgring, it would require every trick in the book to keep the Mission X going.

“You need a four-wheel-driven car to recuperate a lot of energy to have a bigger range on the Nordschleife. Not just for one lap, maybe it was three laps and that’s the reason you have to have a four-wheel drive [EV] on the Nordschleife,” he said.

Although the project leader was cautious to avoid officially confirming a road-legal version of the radical concept car – after his boss, Porsche CEO Oliver Blume, recently told carsales a decision on the Mission X’s production future would be made this year – Behr said the Mission X’s reason for being is simple: to set a new lap record at the Nurburgring road course in Germany.

“Nordschleife is the DNA of Porsche, so everything we are producing or developing, there’s always a goal to produce a better lap time than the predecessor. And so this will be the fastest car if it will go to production, the fastest car of all cars with a number plate on, of street-legal cars on the Nordschleife,” he declared.

Behr, who was involved in the development the Porsche 918 Spyder and more recently the Porsche 911 Dakar, said that if the Mission X goes into production it would be the most expensive, most powerful and fastest road-legal Porsche ever made.

But it’s unlikely to be built in right-hand drive, despite lobbying from Porsche Cars Australia.

“You’ll see on this car it’s a very small package, it’s a very low car as well and then there are some things you don’t need on a show car or a concept car. Say, no air-conditioners, and no wipers, for example and a lot of things you have to have in production car,” said Behr.

“And then it’s more complicated to have two versions so if you’re doing just the right-hand version, that’s okay. Because you have a limited number of cars. But then if there are two versions, it’s much more complicated so I think it’d be one version and then I think it’s left-hand drive.

“If the car will go to production, it will be really very similar to this [Mission X concept] car. Maybe the wheelbase will differ a little bit or there’s some issues of course with worldwide homologations and maybe there are some changes in design as well.

“But I think you will recognise the [production] car as a this one. So it’s very similar,” he said.

“It’s not just a sculpture. We did a lot of simulations to make sure that this sculpture will work on the Nordschleife and it will be very, very similar to this car.”

Porsche’s advanced design specialist Kai Leibrandt expounded on the topic of a production version of the Mission X.

“There’s another important aspect … for us these cars are like proper study cars, where we have certain engineering challenges that we try and overcome, so there are quite a lot of things in this car that we can use on other cars as well,” he said.

“So it’s not just a question of, ‘Okay, we’ll do a show car and then at some stage for sure, there’ll be a production car’ but we use show cars to actually solve very important basic engineering questions, like aerodynamics, chassis, suspension etc.”

One of these is the steering system, with steer-by-wire technology under consideration but bringing pros and cons – such as improved accuracy, but possibly less feedback.

“The whole steering issue is also a question of how do you do it? There is an option of doing steer-by-wire and this is something that we’re investigating,” said Leibrandt.

The concept car’s yoke that replaces a conventional steering wheel could make it to production, but Leibrandt and Behr confirmed that artificial exhaust noises would not be entertained.

Power delivery will be to all four wheels, suggesting two or four e-motors but a combined power output is unknown at this stage.

Porsche has previously stated the vehicle will have 1:1 power-to-weight ratio and Behr noted the production version target is “between 1500kg and 2500kg”. If it was a 1500kg hypercar, it would pump out 1500hp or roughly 1100kW.

Perhaps the biggest question mark hovers over the vehicle’s name – will it adopt the traditional tri-numeral naming convention of its predecessors or does the brand’s first all-electric hypercar require something else?

Stay tuned for more details.

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