Tag Archives: Porsche

News

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

News

How a Tiny Mountain State Became Porsche’s Wildest Playground

If you were asked to guess where the Porsche 911 sells better than any other car, you’d probably say Southern California, Monaco, or maybe a leafy corner of Switzerland. You would not say Andorra—a tiny mountain principality wedged between France and Spain with fewer residents than a medium-sized European suburb.

And yet, here we are.

In 2025, Andorra registered 86 new Porsche 911s, making it the best-selling car in the entire country. Not the best-selling sports car. Not the best-selling luxury coupe. The best-selling car, period – beating Toyota, Hyundai and all the other brands that usually dominate European sales charts.

In a market that sells fewer than 2,500 new cars per year, that figure is as surreal as seeing a GT3 parked at a grocery store. But in Andorra, it makes perfect sense.

The Monaco of the Pyrenees

Andorra’s reputation is built on three things: skiing, mountains, and taxes—or more precisely, the lack of them. With one of Europe’s most favorable tax systems, the country attracts wealthy residents, professional athletes, digital nomads, and business owners who like their income lightly taxed and their garages heavily stocked.

The result is a new-car market that behaves like nothing else in Europe.

Where most countries revolve around subcompact hatchbacks and budget crossovers, Andorra’s streets are dominated by performance cars, luxury SUVs, and six-figure toys. The Porsche 911 isn’t a weekend indulgence here—it’s a daily driver.

When you live in a compact, affluent, mountain-road-rich country with minimal traffic and a healthy number of racetrack-quality passes, the idea of commuting in a 911 starts to feel downright logical.

A Sports Car Beats the Sensible Stuff

That the 911 topped the chart at all is astonishing. That it did so again in 2025—growing from 83 to 86 registrations—feels almost absurd.

To put that in context: the Toyota Yaris Cross, a practical, sensible, fuel-efficient compact SUV, finished second with 63 sales. The Seat Arona, Spain’s affordable home-team crossover, came third with 57.

Those are the kinds of cars that lead sales in normal countries.

Andorra, meanwhile, chose a rear-engine German sports car that can cost as much as €340,000.

Last year, Porsche’s dominance was even more extreme, with the Cayenne and Macan also beating mainstream superminis. In 2025, the lead is slimmer—but the symbolism remains staggering: a 911 still outsells everything.

Brand Rankings from an Alternate Reality

Even stranger than the model rankings is the brand leaderboard.

Despite not placing a single car in the top 10, BMW was Andorra’s best-selling brand with 204 registrations, narrowly beating Mercedes (200).

Toyota, Ford, and Hyundai followed, but the real jaw-dropper comes further down the list:

Ferrari sold 56 cars in Andorra in 2025.

That’s more than one Ferrari per 1,500 residents.

For comparison, Spain—a country of 48 million people—registered just 109 new Ferraris in the same year. In other words, Andorra bought more than half as many Ferraris with one-five-hundredth the population.

That’s not a market anomaly. That’s a statistical mic drop.

What Andorra Tells Us About Cars and Money

Andorra is what happens when geography, wealth, and tax policy collide in a small, dense, car-friendly bubble. People who move there don’t need economical transportation—they need something entertaining to drive between ski resorts, cafés, and mountain villas.

And if you’re going to buy one perfect all-around sports car, the Porsche 911 still makes more sense than almost anything else on the road. It’s fast, usable, reliable, comfortable, and endlessly configurable. In Andorra, it isn’t just a status symbol—it’s the default choice.

Everywhere else, the 911 is a dream car.

In Andorra, it’s just what you buy when you need to go shopping.

Source: Porsche

Restomod

Kalmar 7-97 Turbo

Restomods are supposed to be about nostalgia—rose-tinted memories of simpler cars, rebuilt with just enough modern hardware to keep them from leaving you stranded on the side of the road. But Kalmar has never really played that game. When the Danish outfit unveiled its 7-97—a beautifully sharpened take on the Porsche 993—it already felt less like a museum piece and more like a driver’s car turned up to eleven.

Now Kalmar has taken that idea and bolted on a turbocharger.

The result is the 7-97 Turbo, a strictly limited, deeply obsessive homage to the most feared 911 of them all: the 930 Turbo. Only 11 examples will be built, split between coupe and cabriolet, and every one of them exists to answer a single question: What if the Widowmaker had been given modern technology—and modern restraint?

Turbo Power, Without the Terror

The original 7-97 was a purist’s dream. Its naturally aspirated 4.0-liter flat-six made 417 horsepower and delivered its power the old-fashioned way: cleanly, instantly, and with no digital safety net between the driver and the rear tires.

The Turbo Edition throws that restraint out the window. In place of the 4.0 sits a heavily reworked 3.2-liter turbocharged flat-six that makes an outrageous 659 horsepower and 670 Nm of torque. Those are modern 911 Turbo S numbers, wrapped in a body that looks like it just rolled out of a 1990s Porsche press kit.

To survive that kind of boost, Kalmar went deep into the engine. New pistons, reinforced cylinder walls, copper-beryllium head gaskets, and upgraded valve seats all ensure the engine can handle being force-fed at this level. This isn’t a tuned street motor—it’s a purpose-built turbo powerplant designed to live at the edge.

And yes, it sends power to all four wheels. Traction control is standard, because even Kalmar knows 659 horsepower in a 1200-kilogram car is nothing to joke about. But this is still a proper enthusiast machine: three pedals, a gear lever, and no dual-clutch safety blanket in sight.

From Widowmaker to Precision Tool

The original 930 Turbo earned its reputation honestly. Massive turbo lag, brutal power delivery, and rear-heavy balance made it infamous for catching drivers out mid-corner. It was thrilling, but it was also ruthless.

The 7-97 Turbo is built on the opposite philosophy. Kalmar’s goal wasn’t to recreate the terror—it was to recreate the character, minus the unpredictability. Modern electronics, adaptive TracTive dampers, and all-wheel drive give the Turbo Edition a level of composure the old 930 could never dream of.

You can still get sideways if you want to—but now it’s a choice, not an accident.

Carbon-ceramic brakes sit behind 18-inch magnesium center-lock wheels, while the chassis has been reinforced to cope with the forces this thing can generate. Carbon-fiber doors and roof keep the weight at a stunning 1200 kilograms, giving the Kalmar a power-to-weight ratio that edges into supercar territory.

A Subtle, Smarter 930

Visually, Kalmar showed rare restraint. The 7-97 Turbo doesn’t scream for attention. Instead, it refines the 993 shape into something that feels both familiar and subtly more aggressive.

The rear wears a new whale-tail spoiler, a clear nod to the 930, while the front blends design cues from several vintage 911s, including a grille inspired by the 1967 911R. It’s retro, but not cartoonish—exactly the kind of design that makes you look twice without ever feeling forced.

Inside, the Turbo Edition sticks close to the standard 7-97 formula, but with bespoke details to suit its boosted personality. The example shown wears Recaro Sportster CS seats trimmed in dark brown leather, but with only 11 cars planned, buyers will have near-total freedom to tailor the cabin to their own taste.

A Restomod With Supercar Punch

What Kalmar has created isn’t just a faster 7-97—it’s a redefinition of what a classic-inspired 911 can be. With power that rivals today’s best from Stuttgart, a curb weight that embarrasses them, and a manual gearbox to keep things honest, the 7-97 Turbo sits in a class of its own.

It’s not trying to replace a modern 911 Turbo S. It’s trying to do something far more interesting: deliver that level of performance while making you feel like you’re driving a piece of Porsche’s most notorious history.

The Widowmaker has been tamed—but it hasn’t been neutered. And for the lucky 11 people who get one, that might be the ultimate version of the turbocharged 911.

Source: Kalmar Automotive