After a couple of months with our long-term Porsche Taycan Turbo, I’ve said goodbye to it, feeling really sad for Porsche. Because I’m now utterly convinced Porsche makes the best high-performance EVs, and yet customers globally have given the brand’s electric range a thumbs down. The Taycan, in particular, has been shunned, with slowing sales and tumbling resale values, which is a real shame. The best thing about the Taycan is that it feels like a Porsche first and then an EV, not the other way around, and that nuanced difference is what makes it so special.
The thing with most EVs is that they’re generally one-dimensional; it’s all about brutal acceleration delivered in a very linear, characterless way. Live with the Taycan for a while, though, and it’s the finer details that eventually hook you.
The secret of the Taycan’s brilliance is all about calibration and feel. Sure, the acceleration is cheek-flattening and supercar-slaying, but that’s true of plenty of high-performance EVs. What makes the Taycan different is the way it delivers all those kilowatts. The shove isn’t a solid, flat-line surge; it has an upward slope that makes you feel like you’re winding an engine to max revs, and the extra ratio in the transmission gives you that distinct sensation of a shift into a higher gear. It’s this painstaking effort to make the Taycan feel as ICE-like as possible that forms the core of its character.
The brakes, too, feel wonderfully natural and aren’t ruined by aggressive regeneration. Porsche clearly doesn’t use one-pedal regen trickery for range. The Taycan essentially gives you two main recuperation modes – on and off, plus an Auto function. The steering is wonderfully fluent, accurate and full of feel – the sort of steering that makes you hunt for a longer way home. Sound? In Sport and Sport Plus, you get a deeper electric warble. It’s no flat six, but Porsche has kept it convincingly ‘electric’ and resisted the temptation to layer on gimmicky, artificial noise. That’s what I love about the Taycan – the genuineness. It isn’t pretending to be something it isn’t.
The ride and handling are incredible for a car that weighs around 2.3 tonnes, which makes what it can do on a winding road all the more impressive. The ride is shockingly pliant – more plush than many so-called luxury cars – yet it flicks through corners like it’s a 911 that’s been plugged into the mains.
At our annual Track Day, the Taycan – this very car – came embarrassingly close to the 911 Carrera GTS’s lap time, and it did it all with far less drama. And maybe that’s the problem: the Taycan doesn’t have the noise, theatre or iconic status of its ICE brethren, and it’s struggling to break out of that shadow.
Our Taycan has had a relentlessly busy time with us, pressed into all sorts of duties. It proved that an EV with proper range can do Mumbai to Goa in about the same time as an ICE Panamera. The secret sauce of the updated car is its new battery and powertrain package, which brings more power, more range and faster charging.
Range, in our experience, has been phenomenal, and a long-overdue Maha test proved just how good it is. Pushing the Taycan hard and uphill, I got to Mahabaleshwar with 39 percent charge left – well outside the range-anxiety zone.
On long drives, you start to appreciate the niceties: the spot-on driving position, the great outside visibility, and a digital instrument cluster that’s crisp, legible and refreshingly simple to use – easily one of the best digital clusters in the business.
What’s not to like? Too many touch panels and too few proper buttons. The air-con is buried in the touchscreen, including vent direction, which is a needless faff on the move. The fixed panoramic roof with no shade is another miss for India. In Mahabaleshwar during the Holi break, which marks the onset of summer, the Taycan’s glass roof turned the cabin into a pizza oven in the afternoon sun, and there’s only so much the climate control can fight.
And finally, soon after it came to us, it threw up a ‘steering assistance fault’ error, which Porsche was quick to rectify. But such a failure is, frankly, a blot on reliability.
Otherwise, I’m really, genuinely going to miss the Taycan. It has been amazingly versatile, shatteringly quick, and above all, quintessentially Porsche.
Sergius Barretto
Shapur Kotwal
Ameya Dandekar
Gavin D'Souza
Soham Thakur
