| 777 | Date: Thursday, 28 Oct 2010, 20.49 | Message # 1 |
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| From the moment that Porsche showed off its fabulous 918 Spyder concept in Geneva, we assumed that the company would build this gleaming halo of a hybrid supercar. Now, with Bloomberg reporting that Porsche may set the Spyder’s price at a McMansion-sized $630,000, a limited production run is looking more like a done deal.
The 918 Spyder is the even-pricier successor to the Carrera GT -- and let’s hope the 918 Spyder is a bit more user-friendly than that model and its notoriously high pucker factor. But mega-mileage and low emissions, not a high price, are what’s really significant about a Porsche that might see perhaps 1,000 or 2,000 copies built for worldwide consumption.
Small-scale builders of performance cars, long excused from having to meet any fuel-economy standards whatsoever, are seeing the very real possibility that their get-out-of-jail-free card may be expiring. With both the European Union and the U.S. determined to place carbon-dioxide limits on automobiles, everyone from Porsche to Ferrari is feeling the regulatory heat and plowing resources into hybrid or pure-electric sports cars.
So the 918 Spyder can catapult to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds, romp to 199 mph and wrap the Nurbürgring around its little finger -- lapping the benchmarking German road course in less than 7 minutes, 30 seconds. But Porsche says that when you drive at a decidedly gentler pace, the Spyder can deliver better than 75 mpg on the European driving cycle. And that’s in a midengine, all-wheel-drive supercar that combines a 3.4-liter 500-horsepower V8 engine with twin electric motors that contribute an additional 218 horsepower.
Since the carbon dioxide you emit is directly tied to how much fuel you burn, the 918 Spyder could produce as little as 70 grams of CO2 for every kilometer it drives. For comparison’s sake, a Toyota Prius hybrid, among the world’s cleanest cars, emits 89 grams per kilometer, and the diesel-powered Smart fortwo emits 88 grams. The 2-seat Smart, of course, is far smaller than the 5-passenger Prius, takes seven seconds longer to reach 60 mph (at a nearly 17-second crawl) and is exponentially dirtier than the Toyota in pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and sooty particulate matter. Until last year, Europe’s diesel-favoring rules allowed diesels to emit six times more smog-forming nitrogen oxides than diesels sold in the U.S.; even Europe’s drastically toughened 2009 rules allow its diesels to spew more than twice as much nitrogen oxides as their U.S. counterparts, which is why U.S. diesels typically need to add expensive pollution controls. And that’s just one of several reasons why even the luxury and sports car kings -- Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Audi and Ferrari included -- are pouring development dollars into electric or hybrid cars instead. Meanwhile, some of today’s gas-guzzling supercars emit 400 or even 500 grams more of CO2 per kilometer, or up to nine times as much as the Porsche.
You might argue, as these makers have done, that sports cars built in limited numbers and often driven only a few thousand miles a year should be exempt from fuel-economy rules. And it’s true that companies such as Ferrari and Porsche, which make only high-performance cars, don’t get to offset their lousy mileage with sales of smaller, high-mileage cars, as a General Motors or Volkswagen can.
But there’s another side of that coin: Why should rich people, and the companies that serve them, not have to follow the same rules as everyone else? No one, not even a cold-hearted government, expects Lamborghinis to get 50 mpg, but is it really too much to ask them to deliver better mileage than a tail-fin Cadillac from a half-century ago?
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