Everrati Builds the Electric Porsche 911 of Your Dreams

As any Porsche lover knows, the automaker produces an electric sports car, the Taycan, which in GT Weissach form (US$231,995) develops 1,019 peak horsepower and takes just 2.1 seconds to reach 60 miles per hour. But what Porsche doesn’t do is produce an electric version of its absolutely iconic 911.

At the moment, that’s a job for the British company Everrati, which installs electric power into examples of the 911 built between 1988 and 1994 (code named 964). Everatti also transforms Land and Range Rovers, as well as classic Mercedes-Benz SLs, and an interpretation of the Ford GT40. The 911s have carbon-fibre body panels for lightness and are built in California through a partnership with Aria. That company creates concept and pre-production vehicles for global automakers.

Everrati’s latest creation is the Porsche 911 Signature Wide Body. With the hard-to-miss ducktail, it resembles a 1980s Porsche Turbo—but handles better. For a price that starts at £290,000 (US$360,467) customers get a car with 500 horsepower and 368.78 pound-feet of torque. The car has a 62-kilowatt-hour battery pack from LG Chem, yielding in this lightweight configuration approximately 200 miles of range. A single motor is connected to a limited-slip differential.

Also available is a Legacy model with 247 horsepower and 228.64 pound-feet. These cars look like earlier 911s (without the wide body and ducktail, for instance) and are built in a time-consuming restoration process. Given the work required, the price is the same as the Signature.

The Everrati Porsche 911 Signature Wide Body offers 500 horsepower and 368.78 pound-feet of torque from an electric drivetrain.
Everrati

Features on the Signature include electronically adjustable suspension, regenerative braking, a “Porsche inspired” five-gauge cluster, and DC fast-charging capability. Everrati is also offering a Signature Gulf Edition of the 911, painted in the iconic blue-and-orange livery of the Gulf racing team (as seen at Le Mans and other venues).

The first Everrati 911 to go to a U.S. customer this month is a Mexico Blue Signature model delivered to California resident Matt Rogers, who co-founded the smart thermostat company that eventually became Google Nest. Rogers said in a statement that his car “captures the zeitgeist perfectly, being sustainable and environmentally conscious while also keeping the character of [Porsche’s] air-cooled era.”

Justin Lunny, Everatti co-founder and CEO, tells Penta that the company “doesn’t ‘convert’ cars to electric; instead, we redefine them as electric vehicles, worrying about such factors as driving feel and weight distribution. We hire very-experienced EV engineers and use the highest level of electric components, such as batteries and motors you would see in EVs from OEM manufacturers such as Rimac or Lotus.”

The gauges look like Porsche items, but are altered to monitor battery performance
Everrati

Lunny says that Everrati puts motor and batteries in the back, where Porsche located the engine and transmission on its 911s, with more batteries and power electronics up front, where the original gas tank resided.

U.K. customer cars will still make the trek to California. Lunny explains that right-hand-drive 911s are sourced in Britain and shipped to the U.S., where they’re stripped to the chassis and slowly built up with the new carbon-fibre panels. They then go back to the U.K. for finishing.

“EV is not the only answer, but we do believe it will become the predominate powertrain,” Lunny says.

The company concentrates on a few models, but it’s willing to entertain bespoke one-off commissions, such as an electric Lamborghini for a customer in the Middle East. Such projects require a huge engineering commitment, and the resulting vehicle isn’t by any means inexpensive, costing US$500,000 or more. But it will be fully developed as an EV.

Porsche, too, is mostly going electric, with plans to have EVs make up more than 80% of new car sales by 2030. In 2021, more than 40% of the cars delivered in Europe were at least partly electric, either plug-in hybrids or full EVs. The 911 has no plans for full electrification, though a hybrid version appears likely. Lunny himself drives a battery-powered Porsche Taycan.

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.