Porsche's New 911 Engine Is Using Formula 1 Tech [video]

I had several 911's in the early 2000's. Wonderful cars. When I moved to NYC and sold my last one, after driving it every day for 15 years, it looked and ran absolutely as well as it did the day bought it new and drove it off the dealer's lot. Unbelievable engineering.

sigh that was then. As fabulous as that gas engine was, the electric engine of a Tesla 4-door sedan beats the pants off of it. And here we are---what makes this new 911 engine so cool is.....they pasted in an electric engine. As cool as it is, they would have been better off just using one, bigger, electric engine.

Even if they wanted a hybrid car, putting an electric engine between the motor and the transmission isn't the way to do it. A hybrid car shouldn't even need a transmission---the electric engine should in effect be the transmission, a continuously variable transmission at that.

I loved my 911's, there's nothing like them....but even 20 years ago, they were--as one writer put it--a triumph of development over design. 20 years later its beginning to look like a program which had an architecture already obsolete when it first came out, and which is only still working today by ever more baroque workarounds.

Technology marches on. Its time for 911's to be more like a sailboat--really fun to take out and explore the caribbean islands with, but not even trying to be a big container ship.