The Porsche 918 Spyder delivers speed once never believed possible in a road carIt is difficult at first to describe the Porsche 918 Spyder, the most recent in a long and illustrious line of supercars to come from the fevered minds at Zuffenhausen.mini storageFor one thing, its plug-in hybrid drivetrain is mind-bendingly complex, to say nothing of the colossal 887bhp it can produce.Despite that, it has a CO2 emission figure of just 72g/km and it consumes only 3 litres of fuel per 100km (better than the hybrid Toyota Prius' 3.9 litres/100km), primarily because it can run for 30km on electric power alone.Then, there is its price tag. At €768,026 (S$1.3 million), it is nearly four times as expensive as a 911 Turbo S, which already costs around $1 million here.Most importantly, Porsche cars of the forseeable future will surely look to the 918 for cues, in terms of engineering and styling.To be sure, "the future of the sports car", as it is touted, is searingly quick. Nothing quite prepares you for the combined 887bhp it packs from its two electric motors (one at each axle) and a 4.6-litre V8 lifted almost wholesale from the Porsche RS Spyder racecar.Zero to 100kmh takes a scant 2.6 seconds, and in 7.3 seconds, it would have reached 200kmh from a standstill.If you were expecting a car like that to be quite a handful, then you would be quite mistaken. In spite of its monstrous power, the 918 is surprisingly easy to drive quickly, and curiously undramatic in the way it delivers its extreme performance. Brake late and marvel at how the carbon-ceramic brakes shed speed, steer the 918 via the uncannily accurate helm and, finally, gawp in amazement at the traction the car manages to gain as you fire out of the corner.All the while, the 918 feels positively nailed to the tarmac, with the biggest surprise being not so much its pace but its mid-c迷你倉rner grip. Never have I driven a car with this much poise and composure, a sensation we would imagine is akin to driving a full-blown racecar.The reason for all that intuitiveness is a fiendishly complex drivetrain, something that project leader Frank Walliser and his team worked on for nearly all of the 918's three-year development cycle.Indeed, fine-tuning work was still being done up to the last minute, with the latest iteration of the software rolled out just a week before I drove the car.According to Dr Walliser, the programming for the 918's powertrain software requires about 40,000 data labels, nearly three times that in a regular car.Part of the reason for that complexity is that the electric motor in the front axle works autonomously, with the coordination between that and the electric motor/combustion engine in the rear controlled purely by electronics.Couple that with how the 918 has active aerodynamics that can be altered for maximum downforce or minimum drag, plus torque vectoring that can send power to an individual wheel, and you have what is arguably the most complex supercar on sale today.It could also be the quickest - the 918 currently holds the lap record of 6 minutes 57 seconds on the fearsome 20km Nurburgring racetrack, a place that Dr Walliser says is where the true measure of a sports car's worth is gauged. It beat the previous record by 14 seconds, clocking a sub-seven-minute timing that was once considered impossible in a road car.What is also impossible: driving a 918 here. Not one of the 918 units to be built in a limited-production run will be produced in right-hand-drive form.This is a pity, because Porsche has built a car that, three decades from now, we will still look back on in absolute awe.stlife@sph.com.sgThe writer is associate editor of Torque, a motoring monthly published by SPH Magazines.文件倉
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