Porsche Ends Production Of 918 Spyder

Porsche's brilliantly anachronistic science experiment has run its course. The 918th and final 918 Spyder rolled off the assembly line this week at Porsche's Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen factory, and, in true German fashion, it did so on-schedule, despite Chris Harris predicting otherwise. The final 918 (above) wears a custom dark-red paint job and will probably be worth a significant amount of money some day. (Like it’s not already. What am I saying?)

It doesn't seem all that long ago that Porsche stunned the world with its new hybrid supercar at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show. The 2014 Porsche 918 Spyder was a seriously radical car — a high-performance hybrid that used electric motors to improve both efficiency and performance, coupled with a high-revving V-8 from the RS Spyder LMP2 race car.

The announcement and subsequent production green light a few months later sent the industry scrambling, and both Ferrari and McLaren announced new high-performance hybrids of their own, sparking (pun intended) an entirely new genre: the hybrid hypercar.

The production 918 exceeded even Porsche's expectations. With 887 horsepower, the sprint to 62 mph was verified at 2.5 seconds, and it would eventually blitz the Nürburgring Nordschleife in just 6 minutes 57 seconds — all with the capability to run for 18 miles in electric-only mode without emitting a single carbon molecule.