It wasn’t that long ago that electrification at Porsche was a subject of serious controversy. Would the Taycan ever be a ‘true’ Porsche? Was it actually even a sports car, as the marketing department insisted? The former was for Porsche itself to decide, the latter for its customers. But, regardless of where you stood on either issue, the landscape was changing at an alarming and irrepressible rate.
Our current government, fond as it is of a handbrake turn, gives us eight more years of ICE, at which point the appetite for emissions, even the tacit tolerance of them, is driving off the nearest cliff. Older combustion engines will be restricted from an increasing number of city and town centres, taxed more heavily and, of course, penalised at the pumps. For the foreseeable future, electricity is the only accepted route forwards. Disastrous news for most of us, but not all…
On a disused US Air Force base in the Oxfordshire countryside, Everrati has done the unthinkable and electrified an air-cooled 911. It’s the sort of heresy that will send shivers down the spines of a large proportion of the membership; surely that intangible Porsche ‘soul’ exists somewhere in the oily percussion of its flat-six? So, it was with some serious scepticism that we arrived at Everrati’s modest facility and laid eyes for the first time on the familiar outline of its unique 964, parked up unceremoniously in the January drizzle.
Inside, Justin Lunny and his team have been embracing change with an approach that, paradoxically, borders on the traditional. Everrati eschews the popular retro EV solution that sees workshops around the world creating ad hoc one-off builds with no development cycle or repeatability. Instead, the vision here is to offer a fully resolved product that has undergone countless hours of CAD design and real-world testing.
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Photos: Rich Pearce
