Porsche Casually Entered A British Hillclimb With A Secret Cayenne Prototype

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.

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.