Plug In Sports Cars Rated by the EPA

No long ago a hyper car's EPA fuel economy was nothing more than a specs footnote. These days however the owner and fan bragging rights might extend beyond acceleration and lap times and into EPA ratings. Earlier this year the Porsche 918 Spyder became the first plug in hyper car to be rated by the EPA to the tune of 20 mpg city and 24 mpg on the highway along with a gasoline equivalent of 67 mpg while operating solely on electricity. No longer is the 918 Spyder the only (almost) million dollar member of the plug in hybrid club as the McLaren P1 is now also officially rated by the EPA. The P1 is good for 16 mpg city and 20 highway and 17 in combined driving. It appears that while you can get up to 19 miles of plug in assisted driving from the battery, the benefits are so tiny that you will end up averaging only 1 mpg better driving as a plug in. For reference the McLaren 650S that uses a lower output version of the same 3.8 twin turbo V8 is good for 16 city and 22 highway, but of course the P1 blows it away performance wise. Thus the P1 does pretty well for greatly increasing performance while minimizing fuel economy loses. More impressive mpg wise, is the BMW i8 which is officially good for 28 mpg in the city and 29 on the highway as a hybrid and will deliver a combined gasoline and electricity usage rate of 76 mpg as a plug in in its first 15 miles. Of course the i8 is playing in the minor leagues performance wise compared to the 918 and the P1 but it's fun to compare regardless. It's unknown yet how well the last plug in hyper car, the Ferrari LaFerrari will do, but Ferrari has been able to harness the efficiency of the turbo to achieve an EPA rating of 16/23 for the California T. It's a decent improvement over the 14/19 rating of the original California.

Validation Through Performance

When Porsche first introduced the idea of the 918 Spyder I struggled to get properly excited for what would be Porsche's pinnacle achievement. It looked too simplistic and almost ordinary for a supercar to me, not much more than an overgrown Boxster. The impressive technical specs failed to impress, it seemed to be more of an exercise in what can be done rather than what might be necessary. Then I saw one on the street well before it went on sale and it was immediately clear that it is a proper super car and then some. Yet, I still wasn't sold on the 918. The EPA fuel economy ratings of 20/24 were released and I applauded the Porsche engineering team for the numbers. The first instrumented tests followed and only then was I truly impressed. I finally saw the 918 as a performance machine that eclipses the Veyron and the entire package became that much more appealing. In photos, the 918 now looks clean and purposeful to me and something worthy of a reblog alongside Lamborghinis and Ferraris. The 918 now has my respect and adoration much like a phenomenal athlete that you liked to watch play before but now hold in a much higher regard once they have won a championship. The McLaren P1 is much the same way. At first I disregarded it as much too similar looking to the MP4 12C, but now that I know of its performance it is a true F1 successor in my book that McLaren meant it to be. Winning cures all for athletes and the numbers are what cements super cars as such.

Porsche 918 Is Officially Rated by the EPA

The official EPA fuel economy numbers are in for the 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder and not unexpectedly it scores quite a bit lower than other plug-in hybrids like the Volt, ELR, Accord and Fusion. Of course  it's not competing with those models but the Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1 and to a lesser degree the BMW i8 have not been rated yet so the comparison set is not perfect. The EPA predicts the 918 Spyder will be good for 12 miles on electricity and will consume it at a rate of 67 MPGe. This actually bests the 11 miles of the Prius Plug-in and just one short of the 13 of the Accord but all others have about double to triple the electric range. For what it's worth the four times I have seen the 918 around town it was always rolling silently on battery power. The 67 MPGe equivalent also trails all other plug-ins aside from Porsche's own Panamera and the Karama. Once the juice runs out the 918 is good for 20 MPG in the city and 24 on the highway as a hybrid, unimpressive for a hybrid until you consider that the gas engine is not a small 4 cylinder Atkinson cycle but rather a high revving 4.6 liter V8 good for 608 horsepower on its own. Still the hybrid numbers are better than the 20/21 that the Fisker managed. While somewhat arbitrary it will be fun to see what the P1 and the LaFerrari end up with if only to see which million dollar hypercar owner will have the most MPG bragging rights.