When Porsche says efficiency they mean making more power, not using less fuel. Porsche has a long track record of adopting efficiency tech and using them to make fast cars that still use a ton of fuel.
I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a correction, but if so I don't understand. The description of the two new strokes is as an addition to the normal four, one of which is the fuel intake, I was not assuming that decreases in quantity or anything. It could do, it's just orthogonal to the point - if you don't entirely combust whatever amount you inject in the first ignition , then the idea here aiui is to compress & ignite again to, yes, get some more 'power' out of it.
A recent example of what (I think) the parent is saying, is the new 911 GTS which is now a T-Hybrid [0] engine. But the electric motor doesn't give it better gas mileage than its predecessor, it is just used to eliminate turbo lag which allows them to use a bigger turbo, giving it more horsepower, and using a leaner fuel mixture at full throttle to meet the latest emissions standards.
It is not a correction, but additional context. Indeed Porsche cares about efficiency- but there are different ways to then leverage that efficiency- for either a more powerful car, or a more fuel efficient car. Porsche will choose the more powerful car, because they sell sports cars, not economy cars. Also see my other reply in this thread.
Efficiency in fuel/mile.
Efficiency in Power output/liter of displacement.
But that is just my assumption.
You can have a relatively small engine and force a ton of air/fuel into it under boost and get tons of HP but it tends to lose the ability to maintain fuel economy. Tune it for fuel economy and it tends to lose power. It is very difficult to have both in the same package for many reasons. Adding mods like discussed in the article start to allow for the overlap to be wider.
Extremely simplified, when you drive a sports car, you want to maximize power (work per unit of time), period, you don’t care about fuel.
If you want to go the farthest with a full tank, you want to maximize the total work (proportionate to traveled distance) for unit of fuel.
Reality for practically all cars are between these two extremes, you want to enjoy driving, go relatively fast, and still not wasting 25 liters for traveling 100 km.
Those are correct statements that don’t answer the question I asked. You’ve explained the difference between not caring about efficiency and caring about efficiency. The article said the 6-stroke design is for “efficiency” and did not say Porsche doesn’t care about fuel and only wants to maximize power, contrary to the comment I replied to above. If an engine gives you more power with a fixed quantify of fuel, then it must also give you less fuel for a given quantity of power, right? There’s no such thing as more efficient only for power.
BTW Porsche makes consumer vehicles, not just race cars. And they make engines for other types of vehicles, not just cars. It’s ridiculous to claim that Porsche doesn’t care about fuel just because they happen to make some race cars. Nothing in the article suggests this design is for a race car, nor would it; a patent is designed to be broadly applicable and if a 6-stroke design is shown to be more efficient than a 4-stroke design for fuel-efficient consumer cars, you can bet Porsche will be happy to sell you the engines or license the design.
Porsche cares a lot about efficiency, and their cars are generally designed to be very efficient- but they use the extra efficiency to sell a more powerful car, not a more fuel efficient car.
Beyond some historical agricultural tractors, Porsche has only ever made high performance cars, they don't make general purpose "commuter" or "family" cars. Even their large SUVs like the Cayenne are very high performance vehicles.
The base model Cayenne takes almost 6 seconds to get to 60mph when floored. That’s not particularly fast, even by family SUV standards, it’s comparable to a Honda Passport, and slower than SUVs from Audi, BMW, and Ford, and quite a few others. The Cayenne is an SUV in the first place. What exactly is a publicly available SUV if not a general purpose family commuter car? One of my friends bought a Cayenne to shuttle his kids to school and soccer practice. Porsche absolutely does make a general purpose commuter/family car, and you named it.
Porsche may well care often about high performance, I’m not disputing that at all. The problem with your repeated statement is claiming they don’t care about fuel efficiency. That’s not what “efficiency” means. They absolutely can get more power out of an engine and sacrifice fuel efficiency, and some of their models do, but if the intent of the 6-stroke design is “efficiency”, then by definition they care about fuel efficiency. Whether they use that to achieve higher power, or lower fuel consumption relative to some other car is irrelevant to what is meant by efficiency. Also you’re just assuming that their 6-stroke design is intended for high performance. You might be right, but there are other possibilities you’ve ignored or haven’t thought of.
The Cayenne (and also the VW Touareg which is it based on) is an offroad exotic supercar platform from the bottom up- the handling, engineering, etc. is really unique. It is also, by now, and outdated design that is over 20 years old and not changed very much. It is also a very heavy vehicle with a suspension and chassis that can survive hard offroad racing- jumping it large distances, and landing it hard, etc. The frame, suspension, etc. - it can also tow as much as a full sized pickup truck.
You can get a base model with a smaller engine, but it is still a high performance car design from the ground up. They are also pretty small inside- not much more room than a VW Golf. Yes, (wealthy) people take their kids to school and soccer practice in them. I also take my kid to school in my Boxster... which also on paper is slower than a lot of regular Japanese passenger cars, which in practice it could easily lap on a track because it handles so much better.
To really understand the Cayenne, look at a fully equipped model with air suspension, multiple differential locks, skid plates, sway bar disconnects, and a twin turbo V8 - and look at what people on YouTube do with them. Also look at the V10 and V12 Touareg models.
If you're into performance car driving, you will notice that a Cayenne drives nothing like those other SUVs even if the specs on paper are the same. On a track (off road or paved) with a skilled driver it will easily lap those other vehicles. Specs don't account for finely tuned weight distribution, handling, braking, steering etc. that make a Porsche a Porsche, or the fact that all of the systems (oil supply, etc.) can survive sustained high rpm high g-force track use which would destroy other cars quickly.
You are also misunderstanding my point about efficiency- obviously Porsche cares about efficiency, but they don't design or advertise their vehicles to get low fuel consumption. Efficiency factors into the overall vehicle- more powerful, more range, etc. Improved fuel efficiency is also a selling point, but not the main one.
> Improved fuel efficiency is also a selling point, but not the main one.
Great, this new claim isn’t wrong, so now we agree. ;)
The base model Cayenne can’t do any of the stuff you described, you’re talking about race-equipped cars, which isn’t what Porsche is selling at the base model. You could argue the exact same thing about almost any car manufacturer; most of them compete in track and off-road races. Subaru would be a great example- their consumer cars share design elements of their rally cars. That doesn’t mean an Outback is an exotic supercar, just like it doesn’t mean that a base Cayenne is either exotic or a supercar. In fact, it’s not. The lowest 2 Macan models are even slower than the base Cayenne. These are just “nice” cars, compared to cheaper brands of family SUV commuters, not high performance cars.
You are only seeing how it is used by people that can afford something exotic they don’t need or use and not understanding what it really is engineered for- sort of like concluding the Jeep Rubicon must be a cheap commuter car because they are popular as rentals in vacation destinations where nobody goes offroad. Or seeing urban people wearing arcteryx hardshells as raincoats, and not realizing they really are functional mountaineering gear.
You need to look deeper than the specs at the design and driving characteristics to understand what it is capable of. What makes a Porsche a Porsche is not a low 0-60 time. I have torn down and rebuilt every system on the vehicles, and used them in some of the most extreme conditions on the planet- deep water fording, hundreds of miles unsupported in unpopulated desert, etc. The triple door seal waterproofing and gearbox ventilation systems for deep water fording are alone really unique. You can drive a 20 year old Cayenne deep with water to the top of the grill all day long and not a drop will leak into anything.
A stock even base model Cayenne is one of the few “off road supercars” ever designed and built- and is capable of such things with just the right tires. Of course, some of the rarer factory options radically improve the vehicles capabilities.
I was talking about factory Cayenne options, not race modifications- but the basic design of the vehicle is also really unique to enable those capabilities. For example- other unibody SUVs are mostly on car based platforms, the Cayenne was engineered from the ground up to survive heavy off road use. It is one of the unusual creations of Ferdinand Piech- look up the other vehicles he was responsible for…
The Cayenne’s max wading depth is just shy of 20 inches, about the same as Subaru Forester.
I can find some evidence that people called the Cayenne Turbo GT a hypercar, but nobody calls the base model a supercar. Know why? It doesn’t have the engine. You completely dismissed the small family commuter engine. The engine is the primary thing that makes a high performance car high performance, and base Cayenne simply does not have a high performance engine. And so far you’ve ignored the Macan entirely. These base models don’t have the suspension or brakes or other components for good off-roading. People seem to prefer the Turbo with off-road suspension, better brakes, off road tires, and many other upgrades that together more than double the price compared to a base Cayenne.
It’s true that Porsche makes a supercar, like the 911 GT3, but the base Cayenne and Macan models are just widely considered luxury SUVs and nothing more. Maybe Porsche doesn’t make very many family commuter cars, but they do make a few (that happen to sell well because they’re cheaper than sports cars.)
The fording depth thing really makes my point so I am just going to focus on that. You can't really appreciate the Cayenne design unless you are a person that uses the vehicle in a way that pushes its limits- and have firsthand experience that other vehicles will fail in those same conditions.
The specs vary a bit, but a 957 for example has a steel spring fording depth of 500mm (19.68") and air suspension depth of 555mm (21.85"). Those specs don't really tell the story though.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I pulled up the 2024 Forester owners manual- and it has no factory fording depth- and says to never drive through standing water of any depth, whereas the Cayenne manual has detailed specs on depth under different configurations, and even factory instructional videos on fording technique. Few vehicles explicitly have a factory fording rating depth, and if they do it will be well below the actual physical limits to give a margin of safety.
But looking at the specs ignores the massive engineering differences that make the Cayenne extremely good at fording:
-Triple door seals on all of the doors
-Air tight cabin with continuous positive pressure inside (although personally I keep windows down when fording)
-The differentials, gearbox, etc. are all vented way high up on the vehicle with hoses, through ventilation boxes that pass only air pressure and not water
-The engine intake is mounted at the top front of the engine bay behind the grille, with baffles that allow it to keep water out if moving at the right speed, even if you are much deeper than the intake depth with a bow wave over the hood
-Every electrical connector is completely waterproof and submersible
I was once stuck in deep wet mud half way up the doors in one of these vehicles, and it sat there for ~2 hours before I successfully recovered it, and there was no water in the transmission differential, through the door seals, etc. - something that essentially no other factory vehicle could do, even other expensive offroad vehicles.
Moreover, I have crossed some really deep river crossings- such as the Mojave river in the spring after heavy rains. This was much deeper than the factory rating but just below the air intake level, where lifted jeeps were getting flooded and stranded, and it made it through without drowning. There was a drowned Jeep right next to where I entered, that was waiting for an expensive offroad recovery. I was in a completely stock base model steel spring vehicle, with only all terrain tires added.
Look up "Otis"- a stock Cayenne owned by a friend of mine that has driven it 150,000 miles almost entirely offroad, through some of the most challenging overlanding routes in North America. It is not a high end model, and is unmodified other than tires and a slightly better skid plate.
In both of those the water is probably some 35" deep based on going well over the top of the tires.
Now consider that all of this is on a vehicle which also handles like a sports car, and can make good lap times on a race track totally stock- two totally competing engineering goals. It is not the powerful engine options alone that makes it a supercar, but attention to detail for specific engineering goals - to reliably do things other vehicles cannot - from the bottom up. A regular car with a powerful engine is still not a supercar. The Lamborghini Urus and Bentley Bentayga are also both essentially a Cayenne.
Well alright, I believe you that the design and build is superior, and you have more experience with Cayenne than I do. My main datapoint is my buddy who shuttled kids and complained his Cayenne was breaking down a lot and in the shop too often. But if the thing is generally as high end and robust as you say compared to other cars, then the base model sounds like a good deal even at $84k. Maybe I’ll get one someday. ;) I appreciate the links and stats and details.
Don't get me wrong- the Cayenne is extremely complex to do what it does, and also has supercar level maintenance costs and reliability issues, even in the base models which basically just have regular VW passenger car engines. The rest of the car is still complex and expensive "supercar parts."
They can do unique things, and you pay a huge price for being able to do them- shuttling your kids in something so over-engineered and complex is basically ridiculous- although fun if you can afford it and have other cars as backup. If most of the parts on your car are identical to a Lamborghini Urus which can drive 190mph, none of them will be cheap to fix or replace, even if you have a tiny VW Jetta VR6 engine under the hood. Even just a regular brake job is expensive because the brakes are massive Brembo monoblock brakes, even on a base model.
Porsche cares a lot about efficiency, because with higher efficiency they can make more power. They are a sports car company, and ultimately are building high performance vehicles. That is in contrast to other less performance focused car companies, which would use efficiency gains to allow them to use a smaller engine- thereby making it both more fuel efficient and cheaper/lighter, but not faster.
The Porsche 918 Spyder for example is a plug in hybrid supercar, which uses the hybrid system together with a massive gasoline engine- to make it really really fast.
Porsche can get more power without higher efficiency. That they’re choosing efficiency means they’re looking for higher power with lower fuel consumption. How they choose to use that efficiency is their business, I’m just pointing out that they do, in fact, care about fuel consumption, and claiming otherwise just because they sell high performance cars, is incorrect.
