http://driving.ca/porsche/911/auto-news/entertainment/classic-porsche-has-looks-from-yesterday-and-motor-from-tomorrow Electric Porsche looks like yesterday and drives like tomorrow By Brendan McAleer
[images http://wpmedia.driving.ca/2014/08/electro-porsche-11.jpg 1966 Porsche 912 electric http://wpmedia.driving.ca/2014/08/electro-porsche-5.jpg PHOTO: Brendan McAleer, Driving http://wpmedia.driving.ca/2014/08/electro-porsche-9.jpg http://wpmedia.driving.ca/2014/08/electro-porsche-7.jpg http://wpmedia.driving.ca/2014/08/electro-porsche-8.jpg http://wpmedia.driving.ca/2014/08/electro-porsche.jpg http://wpmedia.driving.ca/2014/08/electro-porsche-10.jpg ] This classic Porsche 912 looks like the Mille Miglia and sounds like the Millennium Falcon In the space of twenty seconds, this thing garners kudos from a guy test-driving a brand new BMW 4 Series, the driver of a glossy black Porsche 911 cabriolet and a grandmotherly-looking woman in a battered Subaru Legacy. Such is the universal appeal of the classic Porsche, its svelte teardrop shape a thing of beauty, its bugeyed demeanour radiating friendly charm. After shooting a few pictures while passers-by shout stuff like, “Nice car!” we jump back in, slot the dogleg shifter in second, grasp the polished wooden steering wheel, and coast out of the parking lot with no more noise than the crunching of gravel underneath the Michelin tires. There’s a whirr as the throttle is gently applied, and this silver beauty zaps forward to a soundtrack that’s more George Jetson than Jacky Ickx. You can see the heads snap around – where’s that beloved flat-six blat? For one thing, this is a 912, a four-cylinder Porsche. For another thing, it’s been completely swapped over to electric. Off it whooshes up the hill on a surge of electric torque, looking like the Mille Miglia and sounding like the Millennium Falcon. It’s absolutely wonderful. For those who don’t know, the Porsche 912 was essentially the 911 light. Produced between 1965 and 1969 (and again for a single year in 1976) as the entry-level Porsche offering, it has the style and presence of the six-cylinder 911, but a 90hp 1.6L flat-four in the back. The engine was derived from that of the 356C, which in turn had been derived from the lowly Volkswagen Beetle. “912” always puts me in mind of Chief Clancy Wiggum’s classic cop-out, “Uh, no, you’ve got the wrong number. This is nine, one… two.” To the casual observer, buying a 912 instead of a 911 might seem indeed to be getting the wrong number, but at the time the 912 was durable, efficient, substantially less expensive than its more powerful stablemate, and it handled more sweetly too. That four cylinder was some 100 kilograms lighter than the 911’s flat-six, which meant less weight out past the back axle. It’s a car that is just beginning to get the respect it deserves, as air-cooled 911 prices climb ever higher out of the reach of the ordinary enthusiast. As the 912 also sold in essentially the same quantities as the 911, that made it an ideal candidate for the conversion. An electric-drive kit for a Beetle could be made to work, it wouldn’t be wrecking a collectible 911, and you’d still end up with something very special. “The response has been really positive,” says Ian Corlett, owner of the electric-powered Porsche, “I built it for myself, but it’s nice I’m not hearing, ‘How dare you!’” Corlett, a Burnaby-born voice actor and television producer, is more a Porsche guy than a electric car enthusiast, but he’s had both in the past. After a hand-me-down Datsun 510 and an early Beetle, he finally replaced a Jetta with a Porsche, a 924. “What a mistake that was,” he says ruefully, shaking his head. The next Porsche was a proper one, a 911SC, kicking off a string of rear-engined machines that would troop through the driveway over two decades. With two young children to transport and an affinity for the occasional trackday, the 911 seemed like the perfect fit. Just one problem. “I wanted to get off the new Porsche treadmill,” Corlett says, “I just wasn’t attached to the cars, and with always having to have the newest thing, it was expensive. I wanted something special I could keep.” While Vancouver can boast an extensive battery of electric vehicle home-builders, Corlett’s previous foray into the EV world was born out of frustration more than enthusiasm. Always wanting a Quadrophenia-style mod scooter, he bought an air-cooled Vespa, only to find its Mediterranean charms far from faithful. “You’d be stomping away on the kickstarter,” he says, “Working up a sweat, and it still wouldn’t start.” A friend helped with an electric conversion kit from a now-defunct company out of Seattle, and soon the mod was rocking. The characteristic two-stroke flatulence was gone, but it was far quicker and more reliable than before, and always ready to go on a sunny day. The original intent for this car was to put an electric drive in a Beetle, but as those kits line up and bolt directly to a Porsche transmission, why not a Porsche? A donor car was found in Arizona – dry desert heat has done more for the classic car community than any museum – a budget was made, and the project started. Corlett even bought a set of lead-acid batteries, right at the outset, figuring the build to be relatively straightforward. And then, as will be familiar to anyone who’s restored a car before, everything went a bit sideways. Firstly, the donor 912 turned out to be slightly less structurally sound than originally anticipated. In fact, when it was rolled into the garage and the seats and upholstery torn out, you probably could have used the thing as a colander. Corlett found a restorer down in Arizona, but the first guy he employed bodged the job. If anything, the 912 was now in even worse condition than ever. The months stretched out. Happily, a second restorer was able to bring the car back from the brink, and the rolling shell was eventually on its way to have the electric powertrain installed at Green Motors in Phoenix. In the interim, Corlett’s stored lead-acid batteries were now completely toast, so the decision was made to switch to lithium. Things were far behind schedule and well over budget but, “If you’re going to do something like this,” Corlett says, “You might as well do it right.” Three years after a broken, faded white 1960s Porsche was first pushed into an Arizona workshop, a bright silver electric 912 rolled across the Canadian border under its own steam. Er, electrons. “The very first thing about driving it,” Corlett says, “Is that without that beautiful [flat-six] noise, you hear every single squeak of a fifty year old car.” So, even after he got the thing home, there were bushings to change and bolts to tighten – the never-ending story of the classic restoration. Then there was the time a recurring issue with the original electrics saw him stranded just a few blocks from home without the necessary spare fuse. A passing VPD officer turned out to be an Audi RS2 owner and complete Porscheophile, and happily stood guard to talk 911s until help arrived. There’s still a tweak or two coming this fall, and maybe something to be planned for the year afterwards, but as it stands today, Corlett’s creation is simply a stupendous drive. It weighs 130-odd kilos more than the original 912, but that means it’s only 25-30kg more than an original 911, the weight of a tank of gas. The electric engine makes 210hp and 200lb/ft of torque, the latter of which is all available almost instantaneously, and you still shift things yourself with an original Porsche dogleg five-speed manual. The range, as yet untested, is somewhere over 100 kilometres. It’s such an odd, deft blend of old and modern. The brakes are upgraded to 911 Carrera fronts and Boxster rears, but they’re still unassisted, so you really have to work at it. The coilover suspension doesn’t look low, but it keeps things flat as you crank the thin, wooden-rim wheel into a turn, and with batteries placed fore and aft, the weight distribution is neutral. It’s electric, so you can’t possibly stall the engine, and there’s so much low-end power that first gear is almost unnecessary. “Not unless I’m showing off,” Corlett says. But then it’s also impossibly tiny and effervescent to drive, with a huge greenhouse and a tight cabin with slightly cramped pedals. The electric engine isn’t completely silent, and comes on with a whirr as you give it a little shove, and scoot on past yet another dropped jaw. Porsche purists can be a rather unforgiving lot, but even the hardliners seem to get it. As a resto-mod, an old car given new lease on life by infusing a modern powertrain, the electric 912 is a lot more interesting than an old Camaro with a modern LS V8 engine swap. Actually, given the quality of the build, it feels less like driving a custom-built one-off and more like piloting some secret Porsche project, only recently released from the vaults below Stuttgart. After all, Ferdinand Porsche Sr., the patriarch of the company, first cut his teeth building an illicit electric generator as a teenager. His ancestral home in Austria was the first house in the village to have electric power, and he would go on to pioneer four-wheel-drive hybrids like the Lohner-Porsche Mixte long before his grandson was involved in making Porsche’s most-famous product, the 911. If the brief was to build something special, then that’s what’s been accomplished. The electric Porsche is modern enough to have its own hashtag (#Electroporsche), and yet enough of a link to the past to make you feel like McQueen in the opening footage of Le Mans, even when you’re just out on a Sunday morning, maybe picking up milk via the long way home. It’s the last thing you’d think of if someone said the words “hot-rod”, but the idea is essentially the same. More than that, it’s a forever-car, the kind of thing that can be lightly tinkered with in the garage and driven on a whim anytime the mood strikes. The sun dances on the mild waves of English Harbour, and waiting red-hulled freighters twist idly at anchor. Elsewhere in the city, compact crossovers jostle with trolley-buses and luxury SUVs. Here, though, it’s a 1966 that never was, Hendrix streaming live over the internet, Kirk and Spock with green-screen CGI, GoPro footage on the first SR-71 Blackbird. A gentle shift to third gear, and the electric 912 fizzes away: past, present, and future in one teardrop-shaped silver package. 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