World's first drive in the Porsche Mission E Cross Turismo

It seems like every day, I see some new car promising a vision for the future, but it's not every day that I actually get to drive the future. This is the future, the future for Porsche anyway. It's the Mission E, Porsche's firs production all-electric car is coming to market next year. When it does, it will mark a seismic shift for a company that wasn't built on ecofriendliness or environmentalism. Porsche was built in performance, and so the question is can this car perform? That's what we're gonna find out. [MUSIC] The production car hits the road next year and what we're driving today is a proto type, a priceless hand built concept the very car that was sitting in the floor show in Geneva just a few months ago. They've shipped it to Malibu California to give us a rare opportunity to behind the wheel. This is a very very early car so I've been told to keep my speed down and to not slam the door to hard and if you noticed some attentive police presence in the area shots It's not that I was driving too quickly, it's because we were given a police escort for the duration of my trip. So yes, I was forced to be on my best behavior. We got our police escort. We're hitting on the road, a bit of a convoy here. I have a first drive in a mission E on public roads. And this is some of the greatest roads in the country, somewhat of a scenic road for sure. Got a beautiful view of the ocean down on my Left, and a lot of visibility out of the cabin in this car. The glass, everywhere around me. Beautiful views of countryside, and a nice quiet electric car to enjoy the ride as well. Now we're gonna get a little room here, and then I'm gonna put my Foot down and [LAUGH] That's pretty good. Now that's maybe not quite [UNKNOWN] but this is still just an early prototype of the car. It's running production [UNKNOWN] something they hope will be, but ultimately the performance isn't really where it's going to be when the production car comes out late next year. This car is gonna be much heavier than that one. And the performance will be higher on that one as well. So while we're maybe not up to model S levels just yet, this car is ultimately gonna be a very different car to drive. Because this is going to be a Porsche, and Porsche's need to perform. This car is suppose to have suite of advance driver assistance systems onboard when it releases. Including some degree of self driving functionality. But given out Audi new A8 will ship without a lot of its planned autonomy features because the market simply isn't ready it remains to be seen whether the market will be ready for that kind of a technology when this car ships next year. Another thing that will need a major improvement to support this car would be a charging network. To start, Porsche's already said they'll be adding fast chargers to all of its 189 American dealerships, each powerful enough to add about 250 miles of range in just 15 minutes. On a full charge, the car will be rated for 500 kilometers in Europe, which equates to about 310 miles. The given the American EPA rating system is a bit more challenging, expect the official number to be a little bit lower here. That was some great twisty canon roads and I'm unfortunately limited how fast I can go. I've got a places for right in front of me, so he's for sure not gonna let me go. Squeaker's at my, Want to, but the handling already feels quite nice. The Panamera is a car already that feels almost supernatural in its ability to kind of hide its weight. And I certainly expect that same level of performance from the [UNKNOWN] production car, especially because so much of the weight is gonna be situated down low, with the back Battery pack down in the floor, that should make this be an excellent handling car when the full production version comes out and when I maybe have the chance to go a little bit quicker. Now, it's worth noting that this is the Cross Turismo flavor of the mission E concept, meaning it's been lifted a little over an inch from the actual production version that we'll get toward the end of next year. That plus the battery pack situated down the floor should mean that the production version should be an incredibly nimble car far more so than its surely substantial weight would seem to allow. The car will have an all wheel drive thanks to a pair of what Porsche calls permanently excited synchronous motors. But this means it would take ages to explain but suffice to say it allows a motor of a given size to make more torque for a given amount of electricity, which in turn should make you more excited if you're driving it. How much torque, well, we haven't been given that figure just yet but Porsche did say the production car will have 600 horsepower Enough to get from 0 to 62 miles an hour in just three and a half seconds. Sure, that may not be Ludacris mode but Porsches car is designed to accelerate like that over, and over, and over again. Long after a Tesla would need a little bit of time to cool off. Not only that but this is designed to be a high speed auto bond bruiser. The kind of performance we've never seen in a full production EV. Now being in the car, I am getting a chance to experience the new human machine interface, the HMI, that's making it's debut here in the car. We saw it in Geneva but we weren't able to really get in the car and play with it. And not a lot of it's It;s actually functional, but it does give you an idea of the kind of vision that Porsche has for their next generation of infotainment system within their cars. We've got this big beautiful, sweeping touchscreen display that's actually two different sections, so even your passenger will have their own touchscreen that they can deal with controlling Media entertainment. Even launching a drone, which I don't think is equipped here in the prototype. But over here I can do things like control navigation. I can change the amount of driver assistance that I have on the car so if I want full control on a twisty road like this I can do that. Or just by swiping up and down, I can choose to have A lot more driver assistance in the future anyway. I've got live apps I can install here and different entertainment options, full navigation of course, as you would expect. Separate climate control interface that's down here in the center. On the steering wheel I've got a bit of a different Approach toward interacting with that infotainment system too. And these two stocks that are built into this steering wheel that have little thumb rolls so I can roll up and down kinda like a mouse wheel almost. But to select is you actually click them in like a mouse. It's kinda neat actually. You can click this in and select things, and toggle through your drive mode. You can toggle through your infotainment displays here on the big, beautiful virtual dashboard behind Behind the steering wheel, and of course I have got my mode selector here as well. So I can go into full performance. The global electric car market is still quite young and while companies like Tesla have done a great job at building the stage I can't help but think that when the Mission E hits the market next year it is going to steal the show. My drive today was limited and perhaps not quite as fast as I might have liked it to be. But I'm still left with a pretty good feeling that Porsche's future is looking pretty great. [SOUND] [BLANK_AUDIO]