It was raining lightly, so I was taken to the station in an electric Porsche Taycan. The dual carriageway looked empty and inviting, so much so that the driver couldn’t resist demonstrating the Taycan’s acceleration from 0 to 100 in 2.5 seconds. The tingling started in my braincase and flowed to my toes in 2.5 seconds.
Equally spectacular is the revenue that the Volkswagen Group expects from the Porsche IPO: 20 billion euros. Not bad for a company that started out in the late 1940s from an old sawmill in Gmünd, Austria, after Ferdinand Porsche’s work for Hitler and the German war industry went unpunished.
Porsche was given a boost when American actor James Dean crashed in a Spyder, an open race version of the elegant 356, in 1955. It was a death like a movie script: a charismatic, rebellious hero succumbs to his passion for speed and danger, only 24 years old. In reality, Dean, made famous by the movie, drove Rebel Without a Cause, at a leisurely speed of 90 kilometers per hour on a two-lane road. An oncoming Ford Tudor turned left, overlooking the low sports car.
But how much future does Porsche have if the car increasingly goes on autopilot and will one day drive completely independently? A Porsche relies on the fusion of man and machine, driver art and superior technology. Without the human factor, the fun wears off quickly.
Nevertheless, Porsche is studying self-driving cars. The self-parking Porsche has the snob appeal that will appeal to the real Porsche driver. You arrive at the airport, get out and the empty car starts looking for a place in the parking garage. The Porsche that helps you by determining the speed and braking in time seems less promising to me. All you have to do is send yourself. It’s kind of like castrating James Dean.
The whole concept of the self-driving car conflicts with the spirit of Porsche, with the flirtation with danger and death that is the allure of a sports car. On the other hand, many enthusiasts regarded the sound of the air-cooled boxer engine as the essence of the Porsche feeling. That is not true, as the electric Taycan shows in 2.5 seconds.