The first thing you should know about the car is that it's two cars.
Imagine a vertical line that runs down through the center of the steering wheel, cutting the Porsche Panamera S E-Hybrid's digital speedometer in two. To your right you'll find everything internal combustion: the fuel gauge, temperature, and the little arrow telling you to fuel up on that side. To your left is everything electric motor: Its level of charge, how much of its potential power the car is using, and the little arrow reminding you the plug-in port is to the port side.
This plug-in hybrid Porsche is the best of both worlds. It is simultaneously a fabulous car, an amalgamation of everything a road-going car can be today... and something that just doesn'tquite feel like the future.
The power of e-power
The Panamera is the "practical" Porsche. It's got the frog eyes of a 911 but is stretched to include the proper backseat of a luxury sedan. Porsche introduced the turtle-esque car in 2009, and in late 2013 brought a plug-in hybrid variant, the Panamera S E-Hybrid, to the North American market. That's what I just drove from Atlanta to the Gulf shore of Alabama to the snaking Smoky Mountain roads of East Tennessee
If you've heard of any plug-in hybrid vehicle (PHEV), it's probably the Chevy Volt. Like an ordinary hybrid, such as the original Toyota Prius, plug-in hybrids can run on gas or electric power and use the gas engine to charge the electric motor. But you can also plug in a PHEV like a pure electric car. The idea is that a driver with a short commute could power up at the office or at home and use minimal or even no gasoline during normal workdays. And then when you want to hit the road, bam, there's a gas engine, with none of the range anxiety of a pure electric car.
PHEVs don't promise you much when it comes to electric driving. The Panamera's motor claims to deliver about 15 miles of electric-only driving; turning on the E-Power mode on Interstate 85 south of Atlanta, I made about 18 miles before the gas engine kicked itself back on. In its E-Charge mode, which charges the electric motor from the gas engine while you roll down the road, the electric reading gets back to 100 percent in about 30 to 40 miles. That's key, as you're probably not going to find overnight charging during a road trip.
You can do a lot with that little bit of charge, though. Yes, the most obvious use case is electric-powered city driving, cutting down on your emissions and your trips to the gas station. But the Panamera S E-Hybrid is sneaky-smart about where it sends those wee jolts. Leave the car in its default mode and the battery charge hovers around 30 percent. That's because while the car is sending some juice to the battery through the wheels or through regenerative braking, it's also using that e-power in spurts to fill in when the gas engine might be lagging.
It's weird. Because this is a Porsche, there's a big tachometer right in front of your eyes, and for many moments along the way it just drops to zero as the computer decides to use electric power. Then it pops right back up. But hey, this huge, heavy car made more than 30 mpg on the interstate for me just because the computer is smarter.
Multiple personality
Like I said, the PHEV Porsche is two cars. But it has multiple personalities—flavors drawn forth from the ways the car can mix its horsepower with its electrons. Default hybrid mode gets 30 on the highway, yes. The cost is that it's lazy, and that's because everything that can be tweaked on the fly is tweaked in the direction of efficiency. There's power there. You've just got to dig deep into the gas pedal to get it. Tap lightly and the Panamera barely responds, as if there's a Stuttgart engineer here to scold your lead-footedness.
If you're driving this, though, then you paid $100,000 for a Porsche. And so there is sport mode, in with the suspension stiffens, the stuffy engineer falls asleep, and electric jolts that had been covering for the gas engine's mpgs suddenly find a new purpose in life and pushes the car, hard. The Panamera becomes a Porsche at the push of a button.
This is not unusual. Buy any high-end car today and its dynamics can change with the push of a button (buy a Tesla and they can change without pushing a button, via one of Elon Musk's over-the-air software updates). But as I cruised down the Southern tarmac in springtime, shifting the Porsche through all its many shapes, it struck me: This is a car supremely stuck in its moment in time.
Smart. Car.
Plug-in hybrids are stuck in time technologically, solving a particularly 2010s problem. The range of pure EVs is still not that great—if you want to drive 1,300 miles across the South like I did, then you still need good-old gas for the long haul. But our wallets and our governments demand more efficiency, so gas gets married to plug-in electric power in a coupling that doesn't quite feel natural. It's an arranged marriage forced by the fact that neither can meet our needs alone.
And plug-in hybrids are stuck in a more spiritual sense. Trapped between the era of the driver and the era of the driverless.
See, driving the Panamera is like driving a science fair project. A $98,000 science fair project that's much smarter than you are. In addition to all the driving modes, which you select via an intimidating array of button encircling the shifter, the circular display to the left of the tachometer displays a rotating display of car information, including a diagram that shows which way power is moving at any given moment—from the engine to the wheels, the engine to the motor and the wheels, the motor to the wheels, the wheels to the motor.
In short, the Panamera invites the driver to be involved in the act of driving, down to the very mechanics of the car. Yet the array of data is so complex that most Porsche buyers are probably going to ignore the number and sail down the highway in chocolate leather heated seat comfort.
And why not? Two minutes in efficiency mode is enough to tell you that the computer knows far, far more than you do about the proper way to program the car. If you want you can still drive the thing like a Porsche. It's 2015, not 2025. But all the things the Panamera S E-Hybrid can do seem like a warning siren. Idiot human drivers won't be trusted with this technology for much longer.
Come together
Clearly, the automakers have seen the raw power to be had through hybrids. The new fleet of top-of-the-line supercars, including the Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1, and Porsche's own 918 Spider, boost their big, overpowered internal combustion engines with electric power to achieve face-melting levels of acceleration on the track. They're doing what the Panamera S E-Hybrid does, but on steroids.
So why do PHEVs feel so... transitory? Maybe it's that Tesla Motors has so thoroughly cornered the market on "the car of the future" that hybrids, old and new, seem like old news. Maybe it's hard to picture this high-tech hodgepodge as the face of the future—it's much easier to imagine a pure, no-emissions EV or even a hydrogen fuel cell car as the vehicle of choice in 20 years.
"Porsche hybrid? What's that like?" That's a question we got from car-loving Southerners all throughout our trip, all of whom wanted to know about the inner working of this shiny beast. The S E-Hybrid is an amazing car, no doubt. It's everything 2015 tech can do. It lets you decide which kind of Porsche you want at any given moment.
It's also a car that almost doesn't need you.
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