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The new Porsche Cayenne Electric has entered production

By now, we’ve all heard the line: Porsche is going electric without losing its soul. But the new Cayenne Electric doesn’t just repeat that promise—it shows what it looks like when Stuttgart actually puts its money, its factories, and its engineering pride behind it.

The Cayenne Electric debuted in November 2025, and Porsche didn’t waste time turning press releases into reality. Production is already rolling in Bratislava, Slovakia, on the same flexible line that builds gasoline and hybrid Cayennes. That matters more than it sounds. It means Porsche isn’t hedging—it’s committing. Whether buyers want pistons, plug-ins, or pure electrons, Porsche can shift production on the fly.

But the real story here isn’t just that the Cayenne has gone electric. It’s how Porsche built it.

An Electric SUV with Supercar Muscle

Let’s get straight to the headline number: 850 kilowatts, or 1,156 horsepower, in the top-spec Cayenne Turbo. That makes it the most powerful production Porsche ever built—more than any 911, more than the Taycan Turbo GT, more than anything wearing a crest.

That figure alone tells you what Porsche is trying to do. This isn’t a polite family EV that happens to be fast. This is a Porsche first and an electric vehicle second.

Porsche isn’t publishing Nürburgring times yet, but let’s be clear: an all-wheel-drive electric SUV with this much output is going to bend physics, shred tires, and embarrass a long list of combustion-powered super SUVs.

A Battery Porsche Actually Owns

Most carmakers buy their batteries. Porsche decided that wasn’t good enough.

Instead, it developed its own battery modules in-house and built a dedicated factory—the Porsche Smart Battery Shop in Horná Streda, about 100 kilometers northeast of Bratislava—to make them. This facility handles everything from cell preparation to laser welding, foaming, cooling-plate integration, and end-of-line testing.

That matters because batteries are now what engines used to be. If you don’t control them, you don’t really control the car.

The Cayenne Electric uses a 113-kWh high-voltage battery built around large pouch cells for high energy density. Porsche claims more than 600 kilometers (370+ miles) of range, along with 800-volt fast charging. But the real engineering flex is the double-sided cooling system—cooling plates above and below the battery, a world first in a production vehicle. It keeps the pack in its ideal temperature window more consistently, which means more sustained performance, better charging, and longer life.

In Porsche-speak: fewer compromises.

A Factory Built for the Electric Age

The Cayenne Electric is born in a newly expanded platform hall at Volkswagen Group’s Bratislava site in Devínska Nová Ves. This is where the skateboard-style EV chassis takes shape before the body—side walls, roof, doors, hood, and tailgate—is added from one of Europe’s most modern press shops.

It’s almost fully automated, fast, and obsessively precise. And Porsche keeps its own engineers on site permanently through what it calls a “resident model”, making sure problems are solved in real time instead of disappearing into corporate email chains.

That’s how you launch a new generation of vehicles without the usual startup chaos.

A Porsche Interior That Finally Goes Full Digital

Inside, the Cayenne Electric goes harder into screens than any Porsche before it. It has the largest total display area the company has ever installed, paired with a faster, more responsive Porsche Communication Management (PCM) system.

More importantly, Porsche says this will be the most customizable Cayenne ever. Given how obsessed Cayenne buyers are with personalization, that could be as big a selling point as horsepower.

The Cayenne Electric isn’t just another electric SUV. It’s Porsche using its engineering culture to try to dominate the premium EV space the same way it once ruled sports sedans and performance SUVs.

With over 1,100 horsepower, a battery Porsche builds itself, a cutting-edge factory, and a platform designed for both volume and flexibility, this isn’t a compliance car. It’s a power move.

The Cayenne made Porsche rich. The Cayenne Electric might be what keeps it relevant.

Source: Porsche

NEW CARS

Capricorn 01 Zagato: The 900-HP Yellow Comet That Thinks It’s a Race Car

By the time most boutique hypercars have finished their first digital render, the Capricorn 01 Zagato has already built three working prototypes and shipped one of them across Europe. The latest version landed at the Retromobile show in Paris just months after the car’s first public appearance in Belgium, making one thing very clear: this isn’t a vaporware fantasy—it’s a functioning, fire-breathing machine.

The first Capricorn 01 appeared in classy Verde Knokke green over brown leather, a look that nodded politely toward Italian grand-tourer tradition. The Paris car, however, throws subtlety out the window. Finished in a vivid Giallo Sole yellow with blue suede inside, it looks less like a vintage Zagato tribute and more like something that escaped from a modern Le Mans paddock.

And that’s exactly the point.

Capricorn describes both versions as “engineering-driven vehicles,” which sounds like marketing fluff until you realize that they’re fully operational prototypes, not static show cars. Even more impressive, a third example is already being assembled at the company’s facility in Mönchengladbach, Germany. This is a startup acting like a serious manufacturer.

The Zagato influence is unmistakable. The trademark double-bubble roof arches over the cockpit, while almond-shaped headlights peer out from an aggressively sculpted nose. The body is packed with race-bred aerodynamic elements, including flying rear struts that recall the Ford GT, gullwing doors, a deeply channeled hood with twin exhaust outlets, and a full-width light bar across the rear. It looks dramatic because it is.

Inside, the Capricorn 01 rejects modern touchscreen minimalism in favor of something far more tactile. There’s a cluster of matching analog dials, a visible open-gate manual shifter, and a round steering wheel fitted with rotary controls. Blue suede, exposed carbon fiber, and modern racing buckets complete a cockpit that feels more like a homologation special than a luxury hypercar.

But the real story sits behind the seats.

The Capricorn 01 is built around a carbon-fiber monocoque and powered by a mid-mounted, supercharged 5.2-liter V8 sourced from Ford and heavily reworked. Output is claimed to exceed 900 metric horsepower and 1,000 Nm of torque—numbers that put it firmly in the upper reaches of the hypercar world.

That power goes only to the rear wheels through a five-speed manual transmission, which feels almost rebellious in a segment obsessed with dual-clutch gearboxes and all-wheel drive. With a curb weight under 1,200 kilograms, Capricorn claims a 0–100 km/h time under three seconds and a top speed of 360 km/h. Whether those figures survive independent testing remains to be seen, but the power-to-weight ratio suggests they’re not fantasy.

The first customer cars are scheduled for delivery later this year, and Capricorn says only a “minimum number” of the planned 19 units are still available, each priced at €2.95 million. That puts the 01 Zagato directly in the crosshairs of Ferrari, McLaren, Bugatti, Koenigsegg, and Pagani—names that usually don’t lose sleep over newcomers.

But Capricorn isn’t exactly new to the business of going fast. The company has supplied lightweight components to Porsche’s LMP1 program, Peugeot Sport’s Le Mans and Dakar racers, Mercedes, Lotus, and Caterham in Formula 1, and Volkswagen’s WRC effort. This may be their first road car, but they’ve been quietly shaping the racing world for years.

The Capricorn 01 Zagato doesn’t feel like a startup’s hopeful first step. It feels like a company finally deciding to put its name on something wild. And if the prototypes are any indication, the hypercar establishment just got a bright yellow new problem.

Source: Zagato

News

Ford Explorer and Capri Gain More Power, More Range, and a Better Battery

Ford’s European EV lineup just received the kind of mid-cycle glow-up enthusiasts usually have to beg for—and it happened at the bottom of the price ladder. The rear-wheel-drive, Standard Range versions of the electric Explorer and Capri have quietly become much more compelling, thanks to a new battery chemistry, a stronger motor, and a big leap in real-world usability.

The headline change is under the floor. Out goes the 52-kWh nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) pack, replaced by a 58-kWh (net) lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) battery. LFP chemistry is cheaper, more thermally stable, and—crucially for everyday drivers—far happier being charged to 100 percent on a regular basis. That means owners can actually use the whole battery without guilt, a big deal in the real world.

Ford didn’t just bolt in a bigger battery and call it a day. The rear electric motor has also been upgraded, jumping from 125 kW (168 hp) to 140 kW (190 hp), while torque climbs from 310 to 350 Nm. The result is a modest but welcome performance bump: 0–100 km/h now takes 8.0 seconds instead of 8.7. No, it won’t pin you to the seat like a Mustang Mach-E GT, but in the compact-SUV EV class, every tenth of a second counts.

Where this update really pays off is in range. The Explorer Standard Range now stretches to a WLTP-rated 444 km on a charge, up from as little as 352 km before. The sleeker Capri does even better, topping out at 464 km versus its previous 370–393 km rating. That’s not a tweak—that’s a fundamental upgrade in how far these cars can go between plugs.

Ford also claims energy consumption has dropped by about 1 kWh per 100 km, a small number that adds up over thousands of kilometers. Combined with the LFP pack’s ability to live comfortably at full charge, these EVs suddenly look far more road-trip-friendly than their spec sheets used to suggest.

There is one trade-off. Maximum DC fast-charging power falls from 145 kW to 110 kW. On paper, that looks like a step backward, but in practice it barely matters. Ford says a 10-to-80 percent charge still takes about 28 minutes, and the Explorer can now add roughly 11 km of range per minute at peak charging speed. In other words, you’ll still have time for a coffee and a bathroom break—just not two.

The best part? In Austria, at least, prices stay exactly where they were. Orders are already open, and first deliveries start in April.

For buyers eyeing Ford’s most affordable electric SUVs, this update changes the math in a big way. More power, dramatically more range, better everyday charging behavior, and no price hike? That’s the kind of upgrade cycle the rest of the EV industry should be paying attention to. And for a brand that’s still figuring out how to win over mainstream electric buyers, Ford just made its entry-level offerings a whole lot harder to ignore.

Source: Ford

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