BEST ELECTRIC CAR 2021 WINNER
the Taycan four-door hard and eventually grip will give out and you’ll get a sudden lurch that, although instantly controlled, reminds you of the weight involved and how hard the car is working. Here that boundary is blurred more successfully.
In short it’s a wonderfully fluent car on any road for any type of driving. Two flies in the soup, one easily managed, the other less so. The acceleration can be distressing. The kind that has passengers gulping and gurning while making sudden uncontrolled grabs for handles. Better, more in keeping, to ease into that powerband. I’ve said it already, but you do not need your Cross Turismo with 750bhp and a 2.9secs 0–62mph time.
Because this one’s capable of that, Porsche has also fitted it with some of the biggest brakes it has ever fitted to a road car – 420mm ceramic composite discs grabbed by 10-piston calipers. It bucks the trend for electric cars having oil tanker stopping distances, that’s for sure, but when they get warm they can bite hard. But to do that you have to actually use them, and for 90 per cent of the time you won’t be – up to 0.39g the braking is all through the electric motors. You do have to use the pedal though, as Porsche doesn’t believe in heavy lift-off regen.
In short it is a swift, sure-footed, smooth, silent and enormously satisfying way of getting about the Elan Valley. And the next day we went to Sweet Lamb Rally Complex. And it completely blew me away. An electric crossover should not be able
to do what this one did to a gravel rally stage. It took it apart. Stability control disabled I could play with the brakes to Scandi flick it into corners. It seemed to glide over the surface, yet find formidable traction for its Pirelli P Zeros. P Zeros for heaven’s sake, not mud or gravel tyres.
The one drawback with electric power is that it is hard to tell how much of it you are using. Especially when the wheels are spinning. The signals you get from a petrol that indicate how hard it’s working, what traction it has, just aren’t there. But with that small exception the Cross Turismo turned in the performance you’d expect of a genuine rally car.
Let’s call this extreme research. We did it so you don’t have to. It spent a whole day doing this, all the battery we could give it before hypermiling back to the 50kW rapid charger 30 miles away at Llandrindod Wells. Barring one solitary puncture wound in the cladding and a few wheel scuffs, it came through unscathed. A day of pounding impacts, flying shards of slate, wheels in the air, skating on the loose and downright dirty abuse – and it cruised home as easily as it cruised there. Had a belter of a drive actually. Gave it an extra 20 minutes at Llandrindod so I could drive the next 100 miles properly. It just feels completely and utterly over-engineered for anything it’ll ever need to do.
Let’s talk practicality, then. If you want this car you’ll make it cope. The 420-litre boot is deep, but lipped and narrow and the tailgate’s slope and load height means it’s not so dog friendly. There’s 34mm of extra headroom over the Taycan for passengers and that makes a world of difference, doubling the sense of space even though there’s no more legroom. Simply cannot fault the driving position, seats, quality or layout up front. It’s attractive and easy to use and that seems to be an increasingly rare commodity these days. And the cabin’s enclosed by superb design. I thought it looked stunning clean, but dirty? Way better.
Think 200 miles of range and hope you don’t have the same three-strikes charging experience I had. My home charger was serviced two days before the Taycan arrived. Naturally that meant it now no longer worked. The Ionity at Chippenham refused to recognise the car for several increasingly fraught minutes, the BP Pulse at Llandrindod wouldn’t recognise any of my credit cards.
I sighed when I first saw the Cross Turismo’s Gravel button. “There we go,” I thought, “a sop to owners to show them this is more than a Taycan.” But behind it lies a greater truth – the Cross Turismo is further distanced from the Taycan than I expected and has a wider range of talent and ability. The standard car, as a sports car, is brilliant, but also reminds you of what you miss from a conventional sports car. This, with a more outdoorsy family remit, treads more gently, has a broader horizon, and yet can deliver 99 per cent of the Taycan’s handling prowess. And in places a standard Taycan can never go. What a thing.