Last year, Porsche made some buzz when one of its development drivers told the media that “fake” EV gear shifts were essentially pointless. As we’ve learned from driving the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, the fact that something lacks practical value doesn’t necessarily make it superfluous. On the contrary, it can actually enhance the experience. Put another way, we kinda like fake gears in EVs when done properly.
Porsche’s stance made sense from an engineering perspective. After all, each internal combustion gear shift is accompanied by a brief interruption in power delivery. If you’re trying to accelerate, that’s a bad thing. So when you’re working with electric motors that have no objective need for such a setup, it’s entirely reasonable to just skip it entirely, right?
Well, during a recent preview drive of the prototype Cayenne EV, The Drive‘s own Kyle Cheromcha talked Porsche’s Sascha Niesen into joining him for a ride-along. Niesen manages Porsche’s prototype fleet, and to hear him tell it, Porsche may not be so down on the idea after all.
In fact, Porsche is not only open to it, but has already built a prototype with a simulated eight-speed gearbox accompanied by engine noises. Not synthesized beeps and boops or even something orchestral; we mean honest-to-goodness engine sounds, as made by an old-fashioned V8. A Porsche Cayenne‘s V8, to be specific.
“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 us.
Making the sound work with electric motors requires some fine-tuning. Electric and gasoline motors turn at very different speeds, so there’s no simple 1:1 translation of an ICE car’s note to EV.
“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.”
Yep, he just said “virtual gear shifts.” Naturally, we wanted to know whether that was simply hypothetical, or something the company has actually experimented with, and whether it could be done with a simple software change. “It’s in consideration if we want to do it or not,” he replied. “It would need hardware. Because right now you don’t have any shifter paddles [in the Cayenne EV].”
Apparently, Porsche has built just such a vehicle, paddles and all. It’s real, and if you ask Niesen, it’s spectacular.
“I drove a concept vehicle in March,” he told us. “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,” he recalled.
But this wasn’t some side project being kicked around by a junior engineer looking to make a name for themselves. It was spearheaded by engineers who had worked on the company’s dual-clutch and torque-converter automatics.
“And they know what they’re doing,” he said. “They were able to make it feel like a proper torque converter gearbox. I could not tell the difference.”
Niesen acknowledged that not every shopper is asking for this, especially in the EV space. But there is a market out there for this level of engagement. It represents added value that can be dialed in almost entirely without extraneous hardware, and it can be toggled on and off at the driver’s whim.
“That’s key,” he told us. “You’ve got to give the customer the option to be more engaged, but in an EV, it cannot be mandatory.”
“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.”
Oftentimes, in the battle of needs versus wants, the wants come out on top.
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