ELECTRIC AVENUES

They’re hugely capable, so why no electric 4WD cars in our group test?

SHOULD WE HAVE TAKEN AN ELECTRIC CAR to the Borders? After all, the rise of the all-wheel-drive performance car has taken a quantum leap when it comes to premium electric vehicles. Porsche’s Taycan and Audi’s e-tron GT (both pictured above), along with the Polestar 2 and Tesla Model 3, could all have joined our party to splash about in some British winter road grime

Or could they? Because while an EV would have wafted north in silence with some unexpected opulence thrown in for good measure, especially if you’d found yourself in a Taycan, it was what would have happened once they arrived that ultimately left us with no choice but to leave them at home. With the available charging infrastructure in the test area, we estimated any EV would be gone for around four hours every time its batteries required replenishing. By comparison, for any of the ICE vehicles present, refuelling was a 40-60 minute round trip.

So what did we miss by not bringing an EV along, other than all the hours parked in an industrial wasteland drinking bad coffee? In the case of the Audi, Porsche and Tesla, three hugely impressive EVS that continue to prove to be more than fit for purpose, providing a seamless transition from ICE to EVS. They’re highly polished and richly rewarding machines that excel at what they are designed to do, blending the refinement of electrified motoring with a level of performance once only associated with the pinnacle of petrol-fuelled cars. Even a 911 Turbo S would struggle to keep a Taycan Turbo S at bay.

But, and it’s a but we apply to many cars regardless of their choice of energy provider, there is more to enjoying the thrill of driving than chasing acceleration times and having your spine crushed against a seat. And it’s here that the EVS begin to lose ground, subjectively speaking, even if across the actual ground they provide blistering pace, immense traction and a level of surefootedness that seems to bend the laws of physics.

Where internal combustion engined cars have been integrating the latest electronic chassis systems into their

comparatively analogue make-up for a decade or more, EVS are fully integrated machines, with every chassis system literally hard-wired to the motors, thousands of microchips working together, controlling torque vectoring with a precision no ICE car can match, managing e-diffs deploying torque and power not only to single axles but individual wheels with microsecond precision.

Yet such system integration still doesn’t plug the driver into the core of the action. Not yet, any way. Human steering and throttle inputs are still very binary processes with responses not totally of your doing or wish; you’re passing on an instruction rather than being integral to carrying it out. But this too is changing, and at an astonishing rate, as Porsche’s Taycan GTS demonstrates (so too Cupra’s Born hot hatch). If we were to conduct our test in the winter months of 2023, some very familiar ICE faces would still be present, but I wouldn’t bet against an EV or two joining the party. And hopefully the infrastructure will be in place to allow us to enjoy them to their full potential.