Electric vehicles boring? Not anymore
Porsche Taycan GTS really is an impressive, Goldilocks version of the Taycan – not too fast, and certainly not too slow, it’s just right.
One thing you never hear a motoring journalist complaining about – and they complain a lot – is that a car is too powerful. So, I won’t name the learned colleague who did just that recently when discussing Porsche’s savage silent assassin, the Taycan Turbo S electric car, for fear it would ruin his career.
He did almost have a point, however, when he said that, while it is intensely amusing to drive this mind-bending, spine-cracking machine for a day or two, and to listen to the screams of your passengers as you demonstrate its ability to go from a standing start to 100km/h in less than 2.5 seconds, if you keep one for a week it can become overwhelming. And melt your licence.
The Taycan Turbo S is a $338,500 four-door sedan that can change pretty much anyone’s mind about the idea that electric vehicles are boring. With its twin motors making 560kW and 1050Nm, it can get you between speeds so quickly that you can find yourself doing 100mph (160km/h-ish) rather than 100km/h. It can also smack its way to 200km/h in less than 10 seconds, and all of this spells trouble.
Fortunately there are other, more liveable variants of the Taycan, and Porsche has just launched what could just be the best of them all – the Taycan GTS – which is more exciting and lovely than the binase models – the rear-drive, single-motor Taycan and the 4S – but just slightly less absurd than the Turbo-badged ones.
The GTS badge stands for Gran Turismo and Sport and Porsche says it represents the “dynamic all-rounder” of any range it is applied to. That means you can, as we did at the launch, enjoy a pleasant cruise through some hills and then arrive at a racetrack and drive it like an adrenaline-addicted maniac.
It also has lots of lovely visual touches — black accents, carbon-fibre bits — and lovely interior feels on things like the steering wheel, made of something called “Race-Tex”.
The GTS gets Porsche’s Performance Battery Plus, with a capacity of 93.4 kWh for maximum driving range (485km) and impressive performance – 440kW and 850Nm. It can also be fully charged in 93 minutes on a DC fast charger, or will get from 5 per cent to 80 per cent in just 22.5 minutes.
Using its hilarious launch-control function, the Taycan GTS can hit 100km/h in 3.7 seconds, which is still crazily fast, but does less damage to your brain and spine than the Turbo S.
Taking this large, four-door, four-seater electric Porsche out on a racetrack was a new and unique experience, because the way EVs deliver torque, instantaneously at any speed, means it launches out of corners with punishing pace, but it is also a very large and heavy car, so you expect it to be a handful in bends.
Incredibly, somehow, the Porsche engineers have produced a GTS variant that stays planted mid-corner and doesn’t fall into the kind of scary understeer logic would suggest.
This really is an impressive, Goldilocks version of the Taycan – not too fast, and certainly not too slow, it’s just right, and yours for $241,900.