Month: May 2022

Enlarge / Wider than a normal 718 Cayman GT4, the ePerformance is also more powerful—and a lot more electric. Lap times are said to be comparable to the 992 GT3 Cup car. (credit: Porsche)

Porsche is getting closer to putting a battery-electric sports car on sale. It’s not quite there yet, but after showing off the Mission R concept in 2021, the company is now hard at work making sure the electric powertrain technology that the concept was supposed to showcase will stand up to the work expected of a Porsche sports car. The company is accomplishing this with a pair of 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance cars.

You normally expect to find a flat-six engine behind the cockpit of a Cayman GT4 (whether it’s one of the road-going cars or the motorsports-appropriate Clubsport variant). In the ePerformance version, that’s where the car’s battery pack lives.

It’s an 82 kWh pack designed to be able to deliver sustained performance for the duration of a sprint race—between 25 and 40 minutes. Porsche has also increased the voltage compared to its other BEV (the 800 V Taycan), as the 718 GT4 ePerformance (and the Mission R) will run at 900 V. This lets the car DC fast-charge from 5 to 80 percent in just 15 minutes.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

You’ve got yourself a fancy new spaceship and you want to start on a five-year tour of the galaxy. But there’s a problem: Space is big. Really big. And even at the fastest speeds imaginable, it takes eons of crawling across the interstellar voids to get anywhere interesting.

The solution? It’s time to build a wormhole.

A shortcut. A tunnel. A bridge through spacetime that lets you skip through all that boring space travel and speed to the fun stuff. It’s a staple of science-fiction, and it’s rooted in science-fact. How difficult could it be?