AIN'T BROKE.FIXED IT?

The Porsche 911. Now with added hybrid. But no plug socket. Just what is Porsche thinking?

- OLLIE KEW

So Ferrari has been content to concentrate on its core product’s bodywork and leave the sainted mechanicals largely untouched. Electrification isn’t allowed near the sacrosanct V12. Trust Porsche to do the opposite. The new 911 looks like the old 911 – on top, but not underneath.

Welcome to the T-hybrid. That’s T for turbo, a word Porsche plays fast and loose with these days. And it’s already muddying the waters with how quick it is. The official claim is 0–62mph in three seconds dead. But the engineers will tell you 2.8. Guffawing about Dominic Toretto, they’ll point out the middle of the range 911 is a 10secs car in the quarter mile.

Because, for the first time in its 62-year history, the 911 is a hybrid. Only the GTS model is electrified for now, but do you really expect Stuttgart to go to all this trouble and not roll it out across the family?

Know this: it’s not a plug-in hybrid, and it can’t travel on electric power alone. The 27kg battery is a 1.9kWh unit the size of a shoebox that lives under the front bulkhead and doesn’t invade bootspace. It provides dollops of power to two electric motors.

One lives in the eight-speed PDK gearbox, and delivers a 55bhp, 110lb ft boost. The other is a 14bhp tiddler and its job is to gee up the turbo. Yes, the turbo, singular. Instead of twin blowers, Porsche binned one and decided on a solo, larger turbo in the new GTS because it spools up so fast thanks to its integrated e-motor. Lag is banished. There are graphs to prove it. In the old GTS there was a two-second delay between flooring the throttle and maximum torque arriving at the rear wheels. That delay is now half a second. Crikey.