Porsche boosts electric Taycan performance
Wild machine sets new standards for power and acceleration, paving the way for a new breed of performance car.
The quickest car in Australia has more doors than seats.
Porsche went to extreme lengths to maximise the potential performance of its Taycan electric sports sedan.
A new version, known as the Taycan Turbo GT, reaches 100km/h in a claimed 2.2 seconds, making it the fastest-accelerating car in Australian showrooms.
As long as you order it with a special “Weissach Package” that eliminates the rear seats, along with a few stereo speakers, the powered tailgate and other elements to save weight.
Ceramic brakes and active suspension are part of the deal.
Porsche says the car makes 580kW of power in everyday running. Activating an “overboost” function pushes that figure to 760kW, which rises again to 815kW for peak periods of full-throttle acceleration.
That’s more than double the power of conventionally rapid cars such as the BMW M3 CS or Porsche 911 GTS.
And it needs roughly half the time required by those cars to hit 200km/h – Porsche says the new Taycan will double the national speed limit in just 6.4 seconds before streaking to 305km/h on closed circuit.
Interesting tweaks include the addition of paddles behind the steering wheel – but not for shifting gears. The right paddle delivers an extra 120kW of power when drivers want maximum thrust, while the left paddle ramps up energy harvesting to charge the battery when slowing down.
High performance petrol cars improve power by burning more petrol, more efficiently – usually with the aid of a turbo or two force-feeding air into combustion chambers.
But the Taycan is an electric car, so Porsche employed “a more powerful and efficient pulse inverter that uses silicon carbide as the semiconductor material”.
Of interest, “Pulse inverters with a maximum current of 900 amperes are used on the rear axle,” Porsche says.
“These deliver even more power and torque than the 600-ampere pulse inverter in the Taycan Turbo S.”
If you understand all of that, you’re ahead of the game.
Time is easier to comprehend, so it’s not hard to appreciate lap records at Laguna Seca and the Nurburgring Nordschleife.
The Taycan is officially the fastest four-door car to lap the latter thanks to a 7m07.55s tour that puts it ahead of cars such as the Tesla Model S and Mercedes-AMG GT Four Door.
And unlike the fastest Tesla models that attracted deposits from Aussie customers who never received cars, the Taycan is set to reach Aussie showrooms this year.
The new machine costs $416,600 plus optional extras and on-road costs likely to tip it close to $500,000 drive-away.
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