Porsche’s own hybrid 911 is in the works, though a good while off yet. But the engineering might of Stuttgart has been beaten to the punch by Vonnen, a firm based in California’s Silicon Valley turning its hand to electrifying 911s.

Chuck Moreland, CEO of Vonnen, says about the idea: “it was a case of us sitting around talking amongst ourselves and thought, hey, wouldn't it be great if... And then we started exploring different ideas of how you might hybridise an existing 911 platform.” 

That was three years ago, a proof of concept using a 996 as a basis underlined that it was possible. Moreland expands: “This is a C2, and what we did was we took a C4 transaxle, which has a yoke to drive the front, we put a motor in the tunnel and instead of taking torque out, we drove torque back into the transaxle to drive the rear wheels. It worked.”

That might have proved it would work, but there was more to come. The proof of concept motor didn’t take advantage of the gear reduction capabilities, so they took a second look. Moreland said: “Okay, cost be damned, what if we wanted to make this thing rip? What would we do?" And so we went back to the drawing board and this is what we dreamed up.”