Porsche Taycan Turbo S Cross Turismo
The craze for dirt-ready Porsches reaches the Taycan, and in some style
Timing is everything, and the Taycan Cross Turismo’s is flawless. And I’m not just talking about its timing in the great battery-electric roll-out race, though the Taycan’s success, both in terms of sales and brand-burnishing kudos, would suggest that too is about right – a touch late, perhaps, but with EVs being first has been no guarantee of success. No, this car’s timing is immaculate in a couple of less obvious ways.
Firstly, jacked-up Porsches are very much a thing at the moment. The 911 has long been happy to be modified and thrown at unpaved scenery sideways, the Dakar 959 elevated the concept to an art form in the ’80s, and high-rise Porsche sports cars are as on-trend right now (see Singer’s ACS Concept and the endless spy shots of 992-gen 911s on long-travel suspension) as not going out, ever.
All of which helps explain why the Cross Turismo exists, and why it manages to look so damn good – better, arguably, than the standard car, with no little RS6-style sleek-estate sauce in the mix. But crucially, far from feeling like a floaty oddball, the taller Taycan actually feels like the optimum solution a lot of the time.
Firing it across many of the same roads last encountered in a ‘normal’ 4S Taycan, any loss of performance through the elevated centre of gravity is almost impossible to discern. But the increased ride height copes better with the appalling state of most of the UK’s road network, the standard Taycan asking that you adapt your speed and line to prevent its chin regularly striking lumpen tarmac. The Cross Turismo asks to be cut no such slack, bounding along even rough roughs at the kind of unchecked speed fast SUVs specialise in but, crucially, without their sense of lofty detachment. The Cross Turismo sits 20mm higher than the Taycan on its standard air suspension – 30mm if the Off-road Design Package is fitted, as it is to this test car – and, though the car sets its height according to drive mode, you can also override it, choosing from High, Medium, Lowered and Low.
Unchecked speed? The novelty of very, very fast battery-electric vehicles may have worn off long ago, but unchecked speed is something you’re never far away from in a Turbo S Taycan. If the 4S powertrain can be labelled ‘More than quick enough, quite frankly’, the Turbo S is best described as ‘Almost obscenely excessive’. Throttle response, given there are no engine internals
or turbo turbines to wait for, is predictably instantaneous. And if the twin e-motors (the rear unit driving via a two-speed ’box, remember, with a shorter initial ratio optimised for launch acceleration) are at all bothered by the car’s near 2.5-tonne weight, they internalise that particular gripe very well.
The kick in your guts is almost unpleasant, and the numbers (as yet unconfirmed: this is a pre-production car) startling. Zero to 62mph in 3.0sec – same as the M5 CS and McLaren Artura – and 0-100mph in 6.5sec. In a family car with a proper boot (at 1200 litres, the Cross Turismo’s is bigger than the Taycan’s) and a powered bootlid.
The other less than obvious way in which this car’s sense of timing is perfect is the happy truth that it’s arrived in the age of Porsche ceramic brakes. Entirely unaffected by the weather (even standing water), the Cross Turismo’s set-up is good: wildly powerful, endlessly sensitive and operated by a pedal so sweetly calibrated that almost imperceptible fluctuations in pressure are the order of the day, not big dumb movements of a rubbery pedal. This car without them doesn’t bear thinking about.
The sum of all the above parts is a quite giddying sensation; one of enormously powerful forces under effortless control. Comfortable in the uncluttered but classy cabin, the Cross Turismo is effortless at a cruise, with tyre roar (on winter rubber) the only threat to your ⊲
otherwise blissfully serene progress.
What it’s like off-road remains an unknown, but given a normal Taycan 4S monstered roads made white by heavy snowfall recently, the Cross Turismo, with its increased ride height and wheel travel, not to mention its dedicated Gravel mode, is likely to be more than up for a Glastonbury or ski-resort car park.
And on the sinuous mountain roads up to that ski resort (less so to Glastonbury), know that your self-restraint, remaining range and passengers’ stomach for speed, and not the Taycan’s cohesion under duress, are likely to be the limiting factors. Rear-seat companions enjoy a 36mm headroom increase in the Cross Turismo, courtesy of the revised roofline.
Body control, grip, steering precision and the delicate calibration of the stability-control system all conspire to make this one of the fastest and, perversely, easiest cars you could ever have the pleasure of driving. So flattering as to feel like cheating, certainly compared to having to flog a manual gearbox or give traction a second thought, the Turbo S Cross Turismo’s ballistic competence would be intimidating were it not so startlingly accessible.
Of course, one of the hallmarks of a virtuoso at work is making the fiendishly difficult look easy, and the whiff of competence has clung to the Taycan from the very beginning. While many marques have struggled, either to create an electric car at all, to create one that makes money, or – crucially – to create one that anyone might actually want to buy, Porsche has made The Transition look almost easy.
In the UK, the Taycan’s become Porsche’s second best-selling car, pushing the Cayenne SUV back to third. And what launched as a two-derivative model (Turbo or Turbo S) is now flourishing into a range, with more affordable rear- and all-wheel-drive Taycans beneath the Turbo models and now the quasi-Allroad Cross Turismo. The Cross Turismo range will mirror that of the existing car with the exception of the entry-level Taycan, so – quite logically – we won’t see a rear-wheel-drive Cross Turismo.
Finer spec details are yet to be confirmed, but expect a premium (Sport Turismos tend to be around £2k more than normal Panameras) and a modest weight penalty. Neither does much to taint the Cross Turismo’s rampant desirability.
The Taycan Cross Turismo’s is a ballistic competence that feels like cheating