Porsche Taycan 4S 2020 review

If you’re interested in buying a Porsche Taycan, it is the one you should look at first. And then ask yourself a very serious question: what is the extra £32,000 or £55,000 required to upgrade this Taycan 4S to a Turbo or Turbo S actually buying you? 

If the answer is a slug more power you may never use, a load of equipment you might never spec and a boot badge for which you give not two hoots, do yourself a favour and spare yourself the money. I would suggest that for most prospects, or at least those who can stomach the opprobrium of friends and colleagues when they see – oh the shame of it – that it’s not the top model, this Taycan 4S is for now the Taycan au choix. The one you should buy. And the only non-neg option should be the performance plus battery at £4613. 

That buys you a 93.4kWh battery compared to a 79.2kWh unit, which not only provides additional range, but faster charging and better performance. So it’s a win, win, win.

And even this (for now) entry-level Taycan will still hit 62mph in four seconds flat, and because electric cars deliver their torque instantly, even that can be quite an uncomfortably rapid experience. It will do rest to 100mph in 8.5sec, for goodness sake, and I’m old enough to remember when that was a perfectly passable 0-60mph time.

Put it this way: in all remotely normal use, this poverty-spec Taycan will still accelerate you from any speed you’re at to any speed you could want at any rate you might choose.

Like the Turbo and Turbo S, it comes with an electric motor at either end of the car and four-wheel drive as a result. Unlike all other EVs, it shares their 800V electric infrastructure. It even sits on triple-chamber air springs at each corner and has Porsche’s PASM adaptive dampers as standard.

Such similarities might lead you to suspect that a Taycan 4S powertrain is, in reality, that of a Turbo or even a Turbo S with only a line of pesky software holding it back: crack the code and a 740bhp Taycan 4S can be yours. Sadly not: The 4S has a smaller rear motor than either of the Turbo twins, and before you start thinking you could still turn a Turbo into a Turbo S, think again: the Turbo has the same 300-amp front inverter as the 4S, while the Turbo S has a 600-amp inverter. So now you know.

Regardless of what the figures say, I have no doubt the 4S with the big battery will have the longest range of any Taycan, not just because of the performance differential, but because it weighs a whopping 165kg less than the Turbo. And because the Turbos are so fast as to actually seem briefly alarming (at least to any unsuspecting passengers), they at least will be glad its performance remains somewhere within the bounds of sanity.