4/16/2023 0 Comments 918 spyderI like it except that the severe angle of its forward controls makes them difficult to read.) Miles pass the ride quality is surprisingly supple for its track duties and uniball suspension joints. (The design is predicted to appear elsewhere in more mundane Porsches. Below my forearm is a slick center stack arc filled with touch-sensitive switches and multitouch graphics. ![]() The seat, with non-adjustable rake, is upright (as I like it), though the telescoping steering wheel's lack of tilt leaves it a bit high for my taste. (Porsche is setting up DC fast chargers for it at major road-racing circuits, including Laguna Seca.) This perceptual change is happening fast: Consider for a second that the next Formula 1 World Drivers' Champion car…will be a hybrid.ĭriving back from Willow Springs in the dark, the 918's various displays glow like the interior of an alien spaceship. It'll quietly roll through Europe's zero-emissions city centers one day, and take to the track the next. Unlike in the speed-is-everything 1980s, the 918 is a hybrid supercar thoroughly engaged in the modern sports car's complex new role where nutball speed is companioned by parsimonious efficiency. Think about it.Flip forward three decades. (Why? A wheel crack would also be detected by a drop in tire pressure.) As a Motor Trend staffer quipped, the 959 was a napkin blueprint for the brilliant Bugatti Veyron, 20 years on. The 959 was a veritable petri dish of ideas, though, some profound, others just cool curiosities - a great example being its hollow wheel spokes, which shared the tire's pressurized air. ![]() Everybody - and I mean everybody - seems to love this car.Īlthough performance-oriented AWD and adjustable ride height are almost dime-a-dozen commodities today, in 1986, the 959's parade of unheard-of hardware might as well have been labeled "levitation" and "time travel." While its more lauded contemporary, the Ferrari F40, got greater exposure from the auto paparazzi's flashbulbs, the truth is the technology that made the Italian fast was pretty much dead-end stuff. A telepathic text message is exchanged: Guys love fire! We pace along like this for a while - me roaring, he shrieking, his helmet fixed in a visual lock on the 918 until he nods and snaps his colorful brain bucket forward and the bike spits away, lane-splitting through traffic. ![]() I give him a thumbs-up, too, this time a gesture of communion from one carbon-combustor to another. Instantly, I switch the EV mode off, causing the 4.6-liter, flat-crank, racing-derived V-8 to explode into a frantic roar, fire-hosing its exhaust into the air through twin, sky-facing pipes. A few minutes later, a café racer shrieks up on the other side and commences to pace me as his gleaming multicolored helmet abruptly tilts to study the Porsche's undulating gray shape. The 918 I'm in is whispering along in its EV mode right now, which makes he and I sort of like EV buddies! I give him a big thumbs-up, a friendly gesture of geek communion, and then whoosh the Porsche ahead in traffic. I glance to my right at the guy driving the Volt and do a double take - why is he grinning and videoing the Porsche 918 with his iPhone like that? Ah, yes.
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