Porsche 'Accidentally' Reveals Electric Macan With Secret Clay Model

This week, Porsche was looking to the past by revealing 13 previously unseen design studies created from 2005 to 2019. If you looked closely in the photo of the ‘919 Street’, though, it was possible to see a car of Porsche’s future lurking in the background.

What you’re looking at here, we’re pretty sure, is a clay model for the next-generation, all-electric Macan. Whether or not its appearance was an accident or a sneaky PR stunt, we can’t be sure. Porsche has since replaced the original image with a tighter cropped version omitting the plug-in Macan, for what it’s worth.

That was too late to stop the picture making its way around the Internet, of course, so whether that was the intention or not, the cat’s well and truly out of the bag. Suddenly, we’re reminded of when the 992 911 GT3 made a surprise appearance in the background of a Super Bowl advert earlier this year.

The 1:1 scale model matches recent spy shots of the car, with some clear Taycan influence at the front. The headlights are a lot slimmer than the ones found on the current Macan, and there’s a single, low-lying opening in the front bumper, in the place of a conventional grille.

The ideal gap to cool an underfloor battery pack and some electric motors, we’re thinking. The next Macan will be electric only, although Porsche R&D boss Dr Michael Steiner recently told CT sister publication Auto Express that internal combustion versions of the current car will be sold alongside the plug-in variant for a little while.

The original Macan first arrived in 2014, with a facelifted version introduced in 2019. A second refresh is in the works (prototypes were spotted undergoing testing this week), meaning the ICE Macan will be good to go for a few more years yet. Its electric counterpart is set to arrive in 2022, so we’d expect the two Macans to overlap by at least a couple of years.