Porsche Mission X: A deep dive inside the first mid-motored EV with the guy who created it

Outside of the willfully illogical Porsche 911, the mid-engined layout has long been considered the gold standard for sports cars, with its perfect balance. Now the world is about to see the introduction of the first mid-engined, or at least mid-batteried, electric cars, thanks to none other than Porsche.

The only drivable prototype of Porsche’s Mission X electric hypercar – which it confidently claims will be the fastest production car ever to lap the Nordschleife (it’s German for “dick-waving-contest facility for car companies and sits in a legendary circuit known as the Nurburgring) – was in Melbourne for the Grand Prix and EV Central was lucky enough to be given a hands-on tour by its creator Michael Behr (who also worked on the incredible 918 Spyder and built the prototype of the 911 Dakar).

As a Porsche engineer, Behr would never admit that putting the engine at the rear of a 911 is a bit of a stupid idea and one they should have fixed years ago, but he’s happy to talk up the fact that the Mission X – and the far more important and real-world relevant new Porsche Boxster and Cayman EVs – has gone for a mid-engined layout.

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Part of this is driven by Porsche’s love of a proper driving position, meaning your butt is as close to the road as possible. Porsche’s other electric sports car, the Taycan, has a reasonably low seating position, but the driver’s backside in a hypercar needs to be lower, so in the Mission X the seat is 123mm lower than in its other sporty EV, the Taycan.

The engineers also wanted to make sure there was enough head room for owners to be able to drive the track ready Mission X comfortably with a racing helmet on.

“What we did was to put the batteries in a block behind the seats, right in the middle of the car, and that’s allowed us to create a mid-engine balance, just like you’d get in a mid-engined combustion car, so the centre of the gravity is in the middle of the car, and we can still make it very low,” Behr explained.

“This also helped us to target downforce, because, unlike a combustion car, there’s no cooling going on at the front of the car, so we can concentrate on generating as much downforce as we can.

“The whole idea of this car was to show what’s possible and to find the new limits, pushing the envelope of what’s possible with an electric vehicle and allowing us to bring in a new era. And how often, in your whole career, do you have the chance to bring in a new era? It’s very exciting.”

The Mission X is still, officially, a concept car, but when you ask Behr and his colleagues whether it will go into production and ask them what the interest has been like in buying one – even at a cost of more than a million euros – (the answer is “enormous”) it’s easy to see that this thing is definitely going to become a real-world collector’s item.

They won’t say just how powerful its twin electric motors will be, but their computer modelling tells them it will be enough to smash all kinds of records.

“The Nordschleife is the DNA of Porsche, everything we are producing or developing, there’s always a goal to produce a lap time, and we can say that this Mission X will be the fastest production car ever, on road tyres, around the Nordschleife, and it will be fully electric, so this is something completely new,” Behr said.

The Mission X looks stunningly futuristic, inside and out, and yes, they do intend to give it that weird, F1-style yoke steering wheel when the concept becomes real. There are no details on range, yet, but Behr said the Mission X must be capable of not just one flying lap but multiple laps of the 21km-long Nordschleife.

My guess is “multiple” will equate to roughly “two”.

With the Porsche Macan EV now imminent and the Boxster and Cayman’s electric replacements coming early next year, it seems clear that Porsche is accelerating hard towards an EV future. Who knows, one day the 911 might even become effectively mid-engined.