If you’re in Britain, and you’ve never been to see one of the many hillclimb events that take place here, you really should. It’s one of the most accessible forms of motorsport as both a spectator and competitor, and if you’re the former, you’ll get to see everything competing from battered hot hatches to wild high-downforce open-wheelers to top-secret Porsche Cayenne prototypes. Wait, what?
Yep, over the weekend, Porsche turned up to the British Hillclimb Championship’s round at the historic Shelsley Walsh course in Worcestershire with a camo’d-up prototype for its upcoming Cayenne EV. No formal announcement, no glossy press pictures, just an SUV that doesn’t officially exist yet being sent up a hill in the Midlands. Oh, and it broke a course record for good measure.
That an electric Cayenne is on the way is no secret. Porsche shared some official pictures of the prototype last year, but they were a lot more heavily disguised than this one. From this, we can get a pretty good sense of the car’s overall look.
Driving the prototype was Gabriela Jilková, a development driver for Porsche’s Formula E team. She took it up the winding 0.57-mile hill in 31.28 seconds, knocking over four seconds off the previous SUV record, set by a W12 Bentley Bentayga.
Porsche Cayenne EV prototype - rear | HillClimb.TV
Details on the electric Cayenne are still few and far between at the moment, but we know it’ll sit on the same electric-only PPE platform as the electric Macan and Audi’s newest, shiniest EVs. It’ll likely come with a range of powertrain options, and given its pace up the hill, this prototype is probably running one of the spicier ones – likely some sort of dual-motor setup.
The Cayenne EV is set to be revealed in full at some point this year – likely sooner rather than later, given the guerrilla marketing tactics Porsche seems to be deploying. It won’t replace the existing combustion-powered car, though – despite the current-gen Cayenne having already been around for nearly eight years, various major updates will keep it fresh and on sale alongside the EV comfortably into the 2030s.
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