Porsche Taycan

REPORT 4

£85,580 OTR/£100,722 as tested/£1,073pcm

WHY IT’S HERE

Because it’s the cool one that could make us all fall in love with EVs

DRIVER

Jack Rix

AROUND 60 PER CENT OF UK HOMES HAVE OFF-STREET PARKING. Ours, unfortunately, is not one of them, which leaves three options for charging the Taycan: 1) At work, except the TG car park doesn’t have a charger... and I’ve been to the office once since last March. 2) Use public chargers, which is possible, but the nearest lamp post or 50kW charger is a 10min walk away and I’m incredibly lazy. 3) Charge at home, which is much more like it, and involves trailing a cable across the pavement and covering it with a sturdy mat to avoid expensive lawsuits from the neighbours.

With the Honda e this was easy – an extension cable to a three-pin plug filled it up overnight, but doing the same with the Taycan’s battery, which is almost three times bigger, would take the best part of two days. So, a wall box is required. Enter Andersen, Porsche’s recommended purveyor of home charging points that don’t look like an old hose reel next to your front door.

They are not cheap. In fact, speccing one up is like configuring a Taycan, don’t pay attention and the bill can rack up fast. The 7kW box itself, with a metal cover, in a colour of your choice, is £995, but £140 more gets you an Accoya wood front. I swerved that and went with Stanton Green all over.

A 5.5m cable is standard, but I dropped an extra £80 on the longer 8.5m cord. The final addition was a £99 adaptive fuse, which monitors the electrical load on the house and turns down the charger if you’re close to blowing the roof off. Oh yes, and £635 for a site survey and installation. Grand total (minus £350 OZEV grant) £1,459 including VAT. Ouch.

Of course, sod’s law dictates that a week after the wall box Lambeth council installed an Ubitricity point in the lamp post outside the house. A request I made three times, six months ago, without reply. Oh well, good to have options.