It has been almost exactly a year since Porsche development driver Lars Kern explained that the German car brand is far too serious to engage with the gimmick of fake gear shifts on electric vehicles. Kern told Australian automotive outlet Drive that Porsche's perspective on falsified shifting action is that it makes electric power delivery worse, but executives in Stuttgart have apparently changed their minds about electric shifting action.
At least that's what Porsche's prototype fleet manager, Sascha Niesen, told the Drive during the recent press drive of the prototype Cayenne EV. Niesen works on all things pre-production for Porsche and said that an internal discussion around the sonic experience of driving an electric vehicle is what spurred the shift in mindset.
"We recorded noises from both the sound it’s making on the inside for the interior, and for the outside, the sound coming out of the exhaust,” Niesen told The Drive. "You need to modulate it because the rev range [on the EV] is much bigger,” he said. “But in theory, if you would introduce virtual gear shifts, you could use the whole thing, depending how many virtual gears you would introduce."
That is a stark contrast in perspective from what Kern said last August, but Niesen said that this virtual gear nomenclature is not simply rhetoric. Porsche actually has a electric concept vehicle with virtual paddle shifters and fake shift points, Niesen explained. Next, Porsche is reportedly considering whether or not this system should be adapted to its next set of EVs. The project is being lead by a team of engineers who typically work on dual-clutch and torque-converter automatic transmissions.
"I drove a concept vehicle in March. I wanted to hate it because it’s artificial and it’s fake and everything. I was afraid that the people that are doing it are just software geeks who have no idea how a transmission works and try to emulate it," Niesen said to the Drive. "And they know what they’re doing. They were able to make it feel like a proper torque converter gearbox. I could not tell the difference."
Niesen said that many Porsche customers will likely be ambivalent about such a feature, but that some true enthusiasts would be excited about the experience. Adding such a feature does not require any extra hardware, meaning that it also represents a relatively small cost increase for Porsche. Our own experiences with a similar system on Hyundai's Ioniq 5 N brought a toothy grin to our face and upped the ante significantly on the driving engagement front. Sometimes the answer to driving enjoyment is not mechanically necessary, but sensorily required instead.
"From an engineering perspective, it doesn’t make any sense to introduce a gear shift. But then again, you have continuously variable transmissions that did introduce gear shifts because it felt more natural. You didn’t need it," Niesen said to the Drive.
It is not immediately clear what models this system could be adapted to. Both the Taycan and Macan Electric are already on the market without any form of virtual gears and an initial drive of the prototype Cayenne EV lacked fake shifting action as well. We hope that the next iteration of Boxster and Cayman would feature a virtual gear set, but even the arrival of the electric 718 has been pushed back. Whatever Porsche decides about virtual gears, we would be quick to line up and give their version a proper drive.
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