What is it?
Just Taycan. That’s what it says on the back of the latest battery-electric Porsche Taycan variant.
Porsche hasn't called it Taycan Turbo S, not Turbo, not Porsche Taycan 4S. Just Taycan, because this £70,690 car is the simplest, although by no means the least appealing, of Porsche’s battery-electric saloon range.
Shorn of a motor at the front, it is both rear-wheel drive and the lightest version of the Taycan, although these things are still relative. Even with the smaller of two available battery options, which is what I would have said our test had if I hadn’t known differently, it weighs 2050kg, so still the wrong side of two tonnes.
But fitted, as this test car is, with an 87.3kWh usable (93.4kWh total) battery instead of a 71kWh (79.2kWh) battery, it weighs 2130kg. Which, for a five-metre-long battery-electric saloon car, isn’t desperate, but is still 270kg more than a base Porsche Panamera.
With this larger, optional (£4049) ‘Performance Battery Plus’, though, your Taycan has more shove. Instead of the 322bhp (402bhp during launch control [because why not more complication necessitating more parentheses?]) of the regular version, the bigger-battery Taycan has 375bhp in normal driving (or 469bhp while you’re using launch control [which you won’t be]).
It also gives a slightly higher power-to-weight ratio: 176bhp per tonne instead of 157bhp per tonne. Or, to put it another way, both rather less than a Ford Fiesta ST’s.
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Tesla fans are just embarrassing. I'm sure the cars are ok. Clearly they're no Porsche but they were the first electric car to catch imaginations. Sadly they haven't really progressed, are badly built and still look about as interesting as a bar of soap. I couldn't imagine ever want to sit in one for two hours looking at that weird screen. Tesla bods anger at the Taycan is enormous. Taycans are interesting not just fast.
So the car has a range of 300 miles.
When, in fact, it's 200 miles.
What a joke.
So a Type R has mpg of 37
When, in fact, its 25
What a joke
This is the Taycan and large electric saloon to buy.
It's fast enough, I would simply add the bigger battery and the Mission e alloys so that it looks like the Turbo S for about 1/2 the price.