It’s tough to reconcile the love of performance cars with an environmentally friendly mindset. You can whir along in an electric car with daft performance figures, but for many of us that just doesn’t match up to the feelings offered by the visceral best of dino juice.
Luckily, for customers in the USA, Porsche has come up with a way to square that circle. Later this year, those who like to strap into a 700hp track monster can have the nice, green glow of helping stave off ecological catastrophe.
The key is the Porsche Impact tool. It’s a program designed to calculate the emissions contributions of your Porsche, then offset them by donating to environmentally friendly projects worldwide. Your car still produces the emissions, but by contributing to projects that are reducing their carbon footprint, you balance it out to a net zero.
It’s not the preserve of the super-rich either. Porsche estimates that someone driving a 2019 Cayenne S for 10,000 miles a year would need to contribute between $67 and $152 each year. The amount depends on which project they opt to support, as each has different value as a carbon sink.
At the moment there’s four projects which you can choose to contribute to. There’s a forest protection program in the USA, a hydropower project in Vietnam, solar energy installations in Mexico, and a species diversity scheme in Zimbabwe.
Porsche Cars North America (PCNA) has already enrolled its own vehicles in the scheme. This includes the cars at the two Porsche Experience Centers, the entire Porsche Passport subscription fleet and the Porsche Drive rental fleet. It reckons it’ll offset 3.5 million miles of driving in 2019, from the 425 vehicles across the fleets. That’s the thick end of 1,000 tons of CO2.
The Impact tool is already available in the UK, Germany, and Poland, as a pilot scheme. Rolling it out across the whole US customer base will create significantly larger waves. Klaus Zellmer, president and CEO of PCNA, commented:
“At Porsche, we are continually focused on innovative and sustainable business practices. Porsche Impact is another way for us and our customers to help offset carbon emissions as part of our goal to become the most sustainable premium sports car manufacturer in the world.”
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