The Porsche Taycan has recently been revealed to the public. If you haven’t heard about the Taycan, it is the pure electric sports car from Porsche. It looks like a coupe, but it is a four-door saloon like a Panamera. To be honest, I don’t like the front-end design that much. The rear-end of the car looks much better and cleaner. I must also admit that I haven’t seen this car in real life. Sometimes, photos can’t reveal the details of the vehicle, and they don’t look that good.
The key point is the technology behind the Taycan, which shakes the foundation of the Tesla vehicles. Until now, there were a couple of pure electric vehicles to compete with Tesla, but they were SUVs and small cars. I didn’t really see a pure competitor of the Tesla range until now.
Taycan is a real Porsche that runs on pure electric power. Let’s begin with the model range. There are two models, Taycan Turbo and Taycan Turbo S. Don’t be deceived by the Turbo branding, there are no turbos involved with this car. Porsche is using an existing branding structure to try and make this car as familiar as possible to existing customers so that the customers will not be alienated by the Taycan.
The Turbo has 680 PS, and the Turbo S has 761 PS. They are both all-wheel drive, and there are two electric motors sitting on each axle. They are powered by 800 volts instead of the traditional 400 volts. This means the Taycan is insanely fast! And, it can be charged to 80% in 22.5 minutes. I really love this very precise timing! The battery pack’s capacity is 93.4 kWh with Performance Battery Plus.
We need to get used to this terminology; electric cars have a totally unique terminology for their powertrain.
And there is a two-speed gearbox! Yes, the Taycan is the only electric car with a gearbox. It is very unusual as the electric motors produce insane amounts of torque, and it is a serious challenge for transmission to handle this power. Taycan’s electric motors produce 1050 Nm of torque. This is a lot of power! It can easily tear off any traditional transmission. The range is up to 412 km!
When you wish to design a transmission that can handle this amount of power, it becomes heavy, and electric motors are delivering this power all the time, unlike internal combustion engines.
The Porsche Taycan has a transmission for the rapid acceleration. The first gear is selected when the driver engages the Sport Plus mode and the Taycan accelerates extremely quickly and shifts to second gear. Transmission is attached to the rear engine. Furthermore, this transmission increases the range by 5%, as well as improving efficiency.
I can’t ignore that you will have a massive screen on the dashboard, 16.8 inches! It will be hard to clean it! Also, Porsche joined the crowd and added a voice recognition system called “Hey Porsche”. It probably won’t recognise when you want to use it and will work when you don’t intend to use it.
You will also have the usual Porsche toys, including 4D Chassis Control, PDCC Sport, Torque Vectoring Plus, and all-wheel steering.
I really like the Taycan, unlike the aging Tesla. The Taycan is created by a company that has a racing heritage. I am sure that the Taycan will be a great success for Porsche, like the Cayenne. Also, the Taycan is not something that is a complete contradiction with the Porsche DNA, like Cayenne and Macan. The Taycan is the future of mobility for sports cars.
Photo Credit // Porsche