Porsche CEO Claims Tesla Is Not a Benchmark for the Mission E Electric Sedan

And even though it's not a 911 clone - or even a Cayman - it's still going to have excellent driving characteristics despite its sedan shape. Or so are the company's officials saying because we're yet to see the car in its final form, not to mention driving it.

That being said, there's been a lot of spotting the test cars used by the Stuttgart-based automaker, and in a move surprising no one, in some of those sightings there were Tesla models following the camouflaged prototype.

If you were a two-year-old, you could think that was a coincidence. If you were a ten-year-old instead, you could think Tesla sent somebody to spy on the Mission E, apparently someone who failed the "Introduction to Stealth" course miserably.

Alas, we all know how these things go: whenever a new car is being produced, it needs to be benchmarked against the reference point in that segment. Stating anything to suggest otherwise would be akin to hiding behind the finger.

Well, it seems the Porsche CEO, Oliver Blume has pretty large fingers because that's precisely what he has done. The actual phrasing suggests he doesn't deny having benchmarked the Mission E against the Californian EVs (which would be hilarious given the video below), but rather that the tests hadn't convinced Porsche to continue doing so. “Tesla is not a benchmark for us,” he said, quoted by Forbes.

In other words, Blume is either claiming that the Mission E is going to be better than the Model S or that it's going to be different enough to make benchmarking irrelevant. Whichever proves to be the case, it would still make Porsche's first EV a very interesting proposition. And we don't have that much left to wait.