Porsche Taycan, Electrified Soul

Four years. That’s how long it took Porsche developing it’s first electric sports car. And that’s a record breaking time for a German car manufacturer, considering that they typically spend seven years on developing new vehicles. And all that with the distractions of a Diesel scandal and the coming and going of multiple CEOs at Porsche’s mother Volkswagen.

But now Porsche has returned to the roots of its founder, who started out with building electric vehicles 120 years ago. The bar was higher today and Porsche must be congratulated for the first electric vehicle that can take on Tesla.

The Porsche Taycan was simultaneously presented at three locations in China, Germany, and Canada. And the performance numbers that Porsche had been teasing for the past weeks are impressive.

Performance	Value
Electric Range (WLTP)	450 km
Charging performance	270 kW
Battery capacity	93.4 kWh
Energy use for 100 km	26.9 kWh
Regenerative braking	265 kW
Torque	up to 1,050 Nm
Top performance	560 kW / 761 PS
Acceleration from 0 – 100 km/h	2,8 seconds
Acceleration from 0 – 200 km/h	9.8 seconds
Drag coefficient	0.22

Additional details included a two-gear transmission, charging performance of 270 kW which adds 100 kilometers of range in just 5 minutes, as well as a display seamlessly from the driver’s to the passenger’s seat. Porsche also has completely redone the usability of the Taycan controls. Software updates are also supposed to come online via an over-the-air update, as it’s been known from Tesla.

Porsche has been extensively testing the Taycan. In Le Mans the vehicle drove over a 24 hours period a total of 3,425 kilometers, and the lap at the Nürburgring was done in the new record time of 7:42 minutes.

The company is taking this challenge serious. Porsche has planned to spend €6 billion until 2022 for ramping up factory capacities in a zero-impact-factory at the headquarters in Zuffenhausen. Until 2026 half of the cars produced will be electric. And Porsche has been on a hiring spree and doubled it’s employee numbers.

The elephant in the room was Tesla, even though Porsche CEO Oliver Blume stated that there is no electric car on the market to be benchmarked against the Taycan. Of course there is, and it will be interesting to see Tesla’s reaction in the next months. But electrification is just a first step. Building out the supercharger network is now the next priority, as well as Porsche’s use of driving data, and the development of autonomous driving technology.

Here are now some pictures of the long expected Taycan, which was called ‘soul, electrified‘ during the presentation. The car is a success and will almost with certainty cannibalize combustion engine sports cars.