Porsche Taycan – New Electric Porsche Named
Porsche’s electric future is underway and the first car has a name – Porsche Taycan. Yeah, you read that right. Tell me you didn’t hear aha’s “Take On Me” in your head as soon as you saw that.
Mission-E becomes Porsche Taycan
The Porsche path to electric has been a long, considered one. While Tesla provides covering fire for everyone, the people at Porsche have been getting on with it. By 2022, Porsche will have spent more than €6bn (US$7.1bn) on electric mobility. That’s twice the originally-planned figure, but I smell some double accounting here.
It’s not just Porsche, obviously. Following the PR disaster of Volkswagen’s Dieselgate, the whole group is going to EV land. We’ve already covered the new electric SUV Cross Turismo and I’ve written about it’s Audi sister car over at Drive Zero.
The Porsche Taycan is the automobile formerly known as plain old Mission E. Taycan sort of means “lively young horse.” I guess Mustang and Colt were already taken (that’s a joke, obviously).
Porsche went to great lengths to remind us they do good names. Cayenne means fiery (ok, cool, but it’s a massive SUV). Cayman means “incisive and agile” (does it?). Panamera apparently means it offers “more than a standard Gran Turismo” (uh-huh).
And Macan comes from an Indonesian word meaning tiger. That I like and didn’t know before.
Taycan Me (not sorry)
We don’t know much else. The drivetrain is comprised of two “permanently excited” synchronous motors. The system output is over 440kW (600PS) with a 0-100km/h (0-62mph) time of 3.5 seconds. Porsche reckons you can do multiple successive launches without a loss in performance. That’ll cause a bit of side-eye among the Tesla fans.
The company says the range is “over 500km” on the NEDC, so it’ll be an I-Pace matching (ish) 450km on the more realistic WLTP. It’s quicker than the Jag, though.
The car goes into production in 2019 at the new upgraded Zuffenhausen plant. The upgrades include a new assembly area, a new bridge to get the bodies and drive units to final assembly and mods to the existing engine plant. Which will no doubt include heaps of power plugs to charge them all up.
Of the extra €3bn, Porsche will spend €500m on the Taycan and variants, €1bn on electrification of the rest of the range (including hybrid versions) and €700m on charging networks, new tech and smart mobility. Oh, and another several hundred million on production sites. Porsche says the Taycan will create 1200 jobs all on its own.
This is as big a deal for Porsche as the I-Pace is for Jaguar. The Cross Turismo will also be super important because SUVs bankroll Porsche’s sportscar business. That doesn’t mean the sportscars don’t make money, it’s just that the SUVs make stacks more. And that means lots of cool weird stuff like special edition Speedsters and 918-style hypercars.
Porsche Taycan Video
Here’s a video of the Taycan, hosted on Vimeo for some reason:
And here’s ah-ha’s Taycan Me (still not sorry):
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Porsche Taycan Images
Peter Anderson is the Editor and founder of the theredline.com.au. He’s been writing about cars for years and finds it difficult to talk about anything else.
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