This all-electric 1960s Porsche will power your home

Your eyes tell you that the Porsche 910 above is an old car. But it is not an old car. It’s the Benjamin Button of Car World – an antiquated Sixties racer on the outside, but actually one of the most modern and technologically-advanced EVs on the inside. Don’t worry if your brain has just melted, that’s quite a natural reaction.

It’s the work of Kreisel, three Austrian brothers obsessed with electronics and dropping high-tech electrical guts into oddities. Though they recently gifted The Governator – Arnold Schwarzenegger – with an EV G-Wagen, this Porsche 910e is Kreisel’s first commercially available EV. Not a bad way to kick off proceedings, eh?

If Porsche isn’t your first language, the 910 was the racing variant of the slinky Porsche 906, or Carrera 6. Lighter, shorter and stickier thanks to 13-inch wheels on F1 rubber, it originally featured a 1.5-litre eight-cylinder boxer engine originally built for Formula One. That, in turn, was developed into a 2.0-litre that would become the most successful racing engine of its time.

Kreisel’s 910e doesn’t have an engine. Instead, there's a high-performance 53 kWh lithium-ion battery pack located in the back – bringing the car’s total weight to a rather lithe 1,100kgs – that’s good for nearly 220 miles of range. But to allow the battery system and powertrain to fit snuggly into the teeny, fragile bodywork, the original frame had to be slightly modified, while the air-cooling of the traditional vehicle was replaced by a new system to keep all the electronics cool.

It’s chuffing quick, too. We’re told the 910e is capable of speeds in excess of 186mph and can accelerate from 0-62mph in in 2.5 seconds (that’s Chiron quick). And, unlike the original Porsche, is street legal.

That’s largely thanks to a trick transmission developed in partnership EVEX, who started working on the conversion with Kreisel last August. To enable those potty acceleration and top speed numbers from an EV drivetrain, Kreisel developed a new two-speed auto transmission with a shorter first gear (8.16) for acceleration, and longer (4.67) second gear for top speed as well as self-locking differential and integrated electric oil pump to ensure everything is suitably lubed up and cool.

Once you have run your 910e out of juice, the batteries can be fast-charged via a 100 kilowatt DC current. Then there’s its final party trick: an in-built and intelligent energy management system working in combo with a photovoltaic installation. Basically, this means when it’s not tearing down the autobahn in silence at close to 200mph, but parked up in the garage and fully charged, the 910e can give energy back to your house to power your kettle and TV while you chill over a cuppa and film in the front room. Nifty.

This modern recreation of the 910 comes fifty years after the original made headlines for taking a legendary sweep of the top four places at the Nürburgring in 1967 (against heftier seven-litre competitors), while Rolf Stommelen and Jochen Neerpasch also achieved sixth place in the overall ranking at Le Mans. But with only 35 910s ever built, these Kreisels will be exceedingly rare and at one million euros a pop, not cheap either. Yes, it’s quicker off the line than a 918 and powers your home, but is it sacrilege to cut up these legendary cars and fill them with new-fangled tech? Let us know below.