After years of dismissing synthetic gearshifts as “gimmicks,” Porsche has been won over by the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N
This week my brain dredged up Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham.
In it the unnamed narrator insists to Sam-I-am that the titular dish disgusts him, only to eventually try it and, sure enough, love it. For green eggs and ham substitute an electric car with synthetic gearchanges, and for our presumptuous unnamed narrator Porsche.
The rise of the virtual gearbox: Why EV sports cars are faking it
Executives at the German company have for years insisted that ‘ugh, it isn’t in our DNA to do something so revoltingly pretend; Porsche will never stoop to such a gimmick’ – or words to that effect. Meanwhile, the rest of us have been quietly won over by the e-Shift in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N.
Then we found out that Andreas Preuninger had recently had a go in Hyundai’s 641bhp EV. Preuninger is the man who has over 25 years sculpted Porsche’s GT division in his own image. The screechiest, lightest, most salivatory Porsches of the modern era are his babies, and his takeaway from the 5 N was that its pretend gearshifts were the most impressive thing about it. Welcome to the club, Andy.
I’ll admit to being relieved that somebody high up at Porsche has taken notice. Electric performance cars are upon us and, whatever the sales charts say in the near term, are only going to grow in number. If you’re a manufacturer, there’s no point being dogmatic about not having this or that ‘gimmick when we’re so early on the innovation curve. Not when one of the first of those innovations can so instantly and fundamentally boost your enjoyment of the car.
I can remember trying the 5 N for the first time on a track and immediately thinking: ‘Holy hell, Hyundai is properly onto something here.’ If you’re the kind of person more inclined to praise a car for having pedals perfectly set for heel-and-toe downshifts, loving the e-Shift function felt pretty rogue, but did it add depth to the driving experience? Without a doubt.
For one thing, simply being in one of many gears gives context to road speed. With a single-speed gearbox, endless torque and slick modern damping, you can become removed from how fast you’re travelling. Vision becomes your only cue. If I have an awareness, consciously or otherwise, that I’m halfway up third gear, I instinctively know I’m in a vaguely sensible place. Top of fourth? It’s getting silly. Most supersonic EVs reduce you to speedo watching.
It’s also true that, in an ICE car, a downshift or two is the curtain-raiser for a juicy corner. You brake, shuffle down the ‘box to settle yourself or elicit some weight transfer over the front axle, and turn in. Maybe you blend all three. It’s fun and interesting. You establish rhythm. A single-speed EV is comparatively binary-less fun, interesting and rhythmic. It’s the particular ebb and flow of multi-geared power delivery that matters, not how the power itself is generated.
Of course, if the tuning is poor, then such a synthesised system isn’t worth having in an EV (hello, Lexus RZ). But the tuning of the Hyundai system is exceptionally good, to the extent that it may have blindsided Preuninger. You can forget that your right foot isn’t controlling an engine. Lifting off at 6000rpm in third generates a subtly different amount of drag to doing the same at 6000rpm in second, and the sense of momentum building and the digital crankshaft accelerating as you pull through gears is spookily natural (the least convincing bit of the set-up in the 5 N is the exhaust note-also the easiest problem to solve).
The system is rewarding enough to have you frequently using the shift paddles, at which point you begin to wonder if, instead of paddles, why not a third pedal and a gearlever? Calibrating a single-speed electric driveline to behave like one with a six-speed manual gearbox would be frighteningly complex. For a start, there are endless ways even to feed in a clutch after shifting, and if the system were to feel intuitive, these would need to be accounted for.
It’s a bit of a mad idea, but someone will try to do it at some point, and why shouldn’t that be Porsche – newly receptive to the idea of fake shifts and in recent years a true stalwart of the manual gearbox? This is why Porsche’s potential involvement in this space is encouraging. It will approach the synthetic shifts in a Porsche way – through the lens of an enthusiast. Anybody who has pulled for a 9000rpm upshift in a 911 GT3 fitted with the jewel-like Sport PDK gearbox knows how seriously they take the business of cog-swapping in Zuffenhausen. Just painstakingly recreate that digitally and pop it in an electric Cayman, please.
