Porsche's unlikely tip for saving the planet

AS NOBLE callings go saving the planet isn’t exactly glamorous. Sorting out recyclables from household rubbish, paying 5p for shopping bags and sticking solar panels on your roof isn’t exactly the stuff of dreams.

Happily, this worthy-but-dull drive to keep the environmentalists happy needn’t extend to driving itself. As long as you’ve got a spare £76,412 lying down the back of the sofa it’s now entirely possible to help save the planet – by buying a turbocharged Porsche 911.

In fact, buying a turbocharged sports car is now the ONLY option you’ve got if you want a brand new 911 (which, I suspect, most of you do). There are all sorts of complicated explanations for why turbochargers are beneficial but the end result is a sort of automotive alchemy where weedy engines can be persuaded to work harder than bigger, heavier ones.

Anyone who went to school in the Eighties will already have learned from their bedroom walls that Porsche knows a fair bit about using turbos to eke a little extra out of the 911. In fact you’ll be pleased to learn that even in the latest model range there’ll be a proper 911 Turbo. Turbochargers went on to make Formula One cars unfeasibly fast (until they were banned) and flame-spitting rally cars a bit too tricky to handle, and in the 1990s your diesel hatchback wasn’t complete without one. Unlike hybrids and electric cars, turbocharging has instant petrolhead currency too. For anyone who disagrees, I present the Volvo T5, the Audi Quattro, the Ford Escort RS Cosworth and the Mitsubishi Evo.

But this time Porsche’s been clever. It’s used turbochargers as an excuse to make the 911’s engines smaller and – here’s the important bit – more efficient and kinder to the environment. Where the outgoing Carrera had a 3.4-litre flat six, this one makes do with just three litres, and you’ll get more to the gallon too. It’s essentially the same trick Honda’s pulled off with its diesel offerings – swapping a 2.2-litre engine for an equally gutsy 1.6-litre – and the magic ingredient that makes Ford’s paperweight of an Ecoboost engine work is the hoofing great turbocharger it’s married to.

So there you have it – you can tell your Greenpeace pals that the new 911 is entirely sensible as green-minded purchases go. Just don’t tell them it’s 20bhp more powerful and seven seconds quicker around the Nürburgring or you’re stuffed.

Coincidentally this is Life On Cars' 911th post. Spooky or what?

Toyota has started the next revolution for UK motorists

THE other day I got to try out a real technological groundbreaker – but it wasn’t a car.

Nope, I was playing Pong on an Atari – it wasn’t the first computer game, but it was the one that really caught the world’s attention. It seems weird to think that in 1972 playing a crude electronic representation of table tennis was at the cutting edge of killing time with a friend, but we wouldn’t have got to Angry Birds and Grand Theft Auto V without it.

On the way home from toying with Atari’s finest – and having a nostalgic test drive of Super Mario Kart on 1992’s Super Nintendo while I was at it – I overtook what I reckon must be the motoring world’s Pong on the motorway.

Time really hasn’t done the original Toyota Prius any favours. In the same way the Atari looks impossibly simple in a world where you download slick games straight to your smartphone, the original Prius looks positively prehistoric next to say, a Focus or an Astra of the same era. Then again, that’s the price you pay for being first out of the blocks with something new.

The Prius might look gawky now but it offered us the first chance to drive something other than a straightforward petrol or diesel – a hybrid - and it paved the way for today’s BMW i8s, Vauxhall Amperas, ‘h’-badged Lexus limousines and KERS-assisted Ferraris. Toyota now offers six different hybrids of its own, including a third-generation Prius that’s a lot more Call of Duty than Pacman.

But Toyota isn’t prepared to leave it at that. For as long as anyone can remember it’s been perpetually locked in a technological arms race with Honda, and both reckon the next big thing is fuel cells. In a nutshell, cars that can refill in an instant with hydrogen, somehow make it into electricity without any need to cue the Pathé newsreel of the Hindenberg disaster and then tootle along leaving only water vapour in their wake.

Honda’s already been at in the States with the FCX Clarity, and now Toyota’s taken a tentative leap into the British market with the Mirai.

The Japanese giant is playing it cautious – perhaps not surprisingly, given the £56k price tag and the almost non-existent hydrogen fuel network here at the moment – and you can tell by its slightly edgy styling that it’s going to be another machine that’ll date horrifically.

Chances are you won’t be ordering one of the first cars off to roll off the boat this month – not when it costs nearly twice the price of a Range Rover Evoque – but you’d be a fool to bet against it.

Toyota and Honda are bankrolling fuel cell cars, and they’ll be everywhere in 15 years’ time. The Mirai will look crude in no time, but the revolution’s got to start somewhere.

Toyota set to sell its fuel cell car in the UK

A CLEVER new Toyota which runs on hydrogen fuel cells – meaning the only thing coming out of its rear end is water vapour – will be introduced in the UK later this year.

Toyota said its Mirai model, a five-door hatchback similar in size to the petrol-powered Auris model, had been a hit in Japan so the manufacturer is now planning to sell it across Europe too.