It’s a consternating combination, being told to stamp the throttle and the brake to the floor at the same time as you’re sitting in a huge, humming Porsche Taycan Turbo on the main straight of a race track.
But what happens next, when you let your left foot slip sideways off the brake and let slip the electronic hounds beneath you, is far more disconcerting. Discombobulating, even, because you’re putting your soft, squishy body through something it’s really not prepared, nor built for. Pouncing from a standing start to 100km/h in just 2.8 seconds in a seamless, sensational explosion of speed.
The all-new Porsche Taycan Turbo
There is little in the way of exploding sounds from the Taycan itself – it’s a fully electric Porsche, so there’s just a kind of rising, rushing sci-fi hum going on – but there’s a lot of noise from any humans brave enough to strap themselves into this rocket ship.
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Largely they are shrieks of shock, accompanied by some irrepressible swearing, but there are also involuntary grunts of pain as the sheer force of the Porsche’s prodigious acceleration pushes your stomach into your spine.
This is the new or face-lifted version of the Taycan (one Porsche spokesman described its new looks as involving the addition of fillers in the face along with a butt lift and a sprinkling of Botox) and what is truly incredible about it is that the brand’s incredibly adept engineers felt the need to make it faster than the old one.
How does the Porsche Taycan Turbo drive?
The original Taycan, first revealed five years ago, was a neck-snapping beast, but Porsche no doubt noticed that lots of competitors were turning up the wick of EV performance, so it decided to reinvent its batteries and motors.
The result is an entry-level model, the rear-drive Taycan (it has just one motor on the rear axle, the other models add a second at the front) that is now a significant 0.6 of a second faster to 100km/h, at 4.8 seconds (helped by a bump in power from 240kW to 300kW).
Believe us when we say that that model is more than fast enough to spritz your adrenaline, but the Taycan Turbo S also cut its scary dash to 100 down from 2.8 to an extremely violent 2.4 seconds, thanks to a power jump from 560kW to a whopping 700kW (we only had the slightly less mad Taycan Turbo to play with at launch, thank goodness, hence our 2.8 experience).
Porsche Taycan Turbo Range
It seems unlikely that any Taycan owners had ever called Porsche to ask for more power, but they added it anyway. Because Porsche. What customers did demand was more range, a vital element of any electric car, but particularly a four-door grand tourer like this one, which seems made for long-distance blasts or, in our case, laps of Tasmania.
By increasing the density of the battery, the range of the entry-level RWD Taycan has leapt by a significant 35 per cent, from 503km to 678km. At the other end of the scale, the Turbo S model jumps from an unsatisfactory 467km to a very usable 630km.
Reports from Europe, where this upgraded Taycan range has been on sale for a while, show that buyers have stopped mentioning the range issue and declared themselves well pleased.
Porsche Taycan Turbo Battery
The new Taycan can also recharge its improved battery even faster and is capable of going from 10 to 80 per cent in just 18 minutes. Or, if you’re in a hurry, just 10 minutes on a fast charger will get you another 315km of range (compared to 225km in the old one).
On the Baskerville track, just outside Hobart, every variant of Taycan we tried was a riveting revelation, with the kind of acceleration that makes hills flat and turns long straights into short ones. In the Taycan Turbo, the numbers on the speedometer seem to flicker they rise so fast, and 200km/h arrives in just a few sharp intakes of breath.
Out in the real world, on Tasmania’s stunning roads, there is little need for the Porsche’s Push to Pass function, which gives you a punch of extra power for 10 seconds, because it just has so much grunt already, all the time.
Speed is not everything, of course, and the way the big Taycan handles through bends, sitting wonderfully flat and providing delectable feedback through its Porsche-perfect steering, turns any journey into a smile-filled adventure. Cruise along at middling speeds and what you come to appreciate is the way this Porsche rides, thanks to its active suspension, dealing with bumps and broken tarmac with ease.
Porsche Taycan Turbo Price
The original Taycan was a hugely capable machine, a brilliant first effort at creating an EV worthy of the Porsche badge, but this new version truly takes this car to new heights.
All that engineering, and pace, comes at a cost, of course, and the very least you can pay to get into a new Porsche Taycan is $174,500 for the base model, which rises through $215,700 for the Taycan 4S and $306,900 for the Turbo, all the way to hefty $373,600 for the terrifying Turbo S model.
Frankly, the entry-level rear-drive Taycan would be more than enough electric Porsche magic for most of us.
