Porsche’s bright spark
A 2.6-ton sports car with a battery? It’s...
I’M SITTING on the start line at the historic Goodwood motor-racing circuit in West Sussex. And I’m at the wheel of a new, white Porsche, which complements perfectly the restored and whitewashed 1950s control tower and pit buildings. Porsches have raced at Goodwood since the earliest days of both. But there has never been a Porsche quite like this one.
Porsche calls its new Taycan a sports car, but it has four doors and four seats, and when all of those seats are occupied it weighs as much as a fully laden Transit van at 2.6 tons. Nothing very sporting about that. It also has a large battery pack hidden in the floor and an electric motor.
Porsche purists, of whom there are many, might be horrified. But I think they’d be won over by what happens next.
I put the Taycan into ‘launch control’ mode, and when I mash the accelerator it uses its peak 751 horsepower to fire me down the pit straight at Star Trek-style warp-speed pace. It’s an absurd rate of acceleration.
Porsche claims this big, heavy car will hit 60mph in just 2.8 seconds. If you want to beat that with a petrol engine, you’d need a £1million-plus hypercar, such as a Bugatti Chiron.
The very first car designed by the firm’s founder, engineer Ferdinand Porsche, was battery-powered – the Lohner-Porsche of 1900. Porsche the carmaker was founded after the Second World War and established a stellar reputation in motorsport and for its iconic 911 sportscar.
But times are changing, and with combustion engines to be banned in many countries in the next two decades, Porsche is returning to its roots. Its aim with the Taycan was to make an electric car you’ll drive because you want to, not because a politician tells you to. It needed to incorporate as much Porsche DNA as possible, without the petrol engine. A few laps of Goodwood prove they have succeeded.
Such a heavy car – the weight is all in the batteries – shouldn’t handle as well as this. But the Taycan flows around the track with almost supernatural composure, and accelerates out of each bend as instantly as a light bulb responds to a dimmer switch.
Inside it’s pure Porsche too. Its dramatic cabin echoes the forms of the 911 and the Panamera saloon. It is beautifully made and feels like it would survive a lifetime’s use. But the switchgear is arranged in a slightly haphazard fashion – another Porsche trait – and the ‘gear lever’ is hidden slightly annoyingly behind the steering wheel.
This may be a car you drive for fun rather than purely for transport, but more range from those big batteries would be desirable. The Taycan will travel a maximum of 254 miles between charges, but a Tesla Model S claims to cover 379 miles now and Jaguar’s iPace nearly 300.
In the real world, the Taycan’s range will be cut dramatically if you’re tempted to keep accessing that mad rush of acceleration, but the battery can go from five to 80 per cent full in just 22 minutes.
And given that this is a car designed to be enjoyed, don’t expect any Government help to buy it – ultra-low emission vehicles costing more than £50,000 don’t get a grant. With a few options, the Taycan Turbo S that I drove can easily cost three times that, though the range starts at ‘just’ £83,580. Those quibbles aside, this is a benchmark car. A friend asked me recently to name my dream ten-car garage, money no object. The Taycan went straight in as my daily driver.
Green plates: extra no other Porsche gets
Electric vehicles (EVs) can be fitted with number plates with a green flash from this autumn, the Government has announced.
The aim is to encourage the uptake of EVs by providing a visible indication of which cars don’t produce tailpipe emissions and to make it easier to provide incentives such as free or cheap parking. A date for the green plate’s introduction hasn’t yet been revealed, and it won’t be compulsory, but any new or existing fully electric vehicle will be able to have one.