New car news

25 February 2010 - 00:00

On to greener Porsches

Porsche are very good at the following things: building cars that are very fast and, erm, building cars that are very fast. But there's nothing wrong with being a one-trick pony when the little horse your selling is one of the most sought-after supercars on the planet.

Now Porsche has done something out of character - they've built a hybrid, and unlike that GT3, this one's for general release.

Yep, the Germans have taken their biggest, baddest, planet-destroying model, and gone all environmentalist on it.

Say hello to the Cayenne S Hybrid, the car Porsche will unveil at next week's Geneva Motor Show. With a comparatively low fuel economy of 8.2 litres/100km, the Cayenne S hybrid ‘combines the performance of an eight-cylinder with the economy of a six-cylinder', or so Porsche tells us.

The new Cayenne is 180kg lighter than the previous model, despite the addition of the hybrid's electric motor on top of the Cayenne's 3.0-litre supercharged V6. Depending on the driving situation, the Cayenne operates with either one driving unit operating solely, or with both drives working simultaneously.

It's all very technical, but it's numbers that count, and the hybrid has a combined max power of 279kW and 580Nm on tap. Not bad considering the advantage of the electric motor's assistance at take off - two heads being better than one and all that.

The thing that really irks us about the new hybrid is that Porsche claim the Cayenne will be whisper quiet at speeds up to 60km/h with a ‘moderate style of driving' - where's the fun in that? Aren't Porsches meant to be loud and driven vigorously? Has the world gone mad and this is its Porsche?

Let's hope not, we couldn't bear the thought of a flower-powered 911.