The Electric Porsche Needs to Roar

In his years overseeing the development of Porsche’s Cayman and Boxster two-seaters, Stefan Weckbach never faced a hurdle like the one he encountered when shepherding the company’s first all-electric car to market: acoustics. Electric vehicles, it seems, may be too quiet to be considered Porsches. “Our customers are very emotional about sound,” says Weckbach, the chief of the brand’s push to introduce an electric sedan in 2019. “They told us, ‘We like the growl of your engines, and we expect something similar for an electric.’ ”

For the past two years, Weckbach has led a team of about 30 developing the Mission E, a four-door sedan that looks something like a scaled-down Panamera. That team—each member with a specialization such as design, logistics, or finance—can dip into Porsche’s pool of thousands of experts who deal with challenges ranging from the arcane (the strength of the door hinges) to the fundamental (will a model be a roadster or ­sport-utility vehicle?).