Category Archives: Taycan / Mission E

Used Car of the Year Awards: Electric cars

November 10, 2023Electric Cars, News, Reviews and Comment, Porsche, Renault, Skoda, Taycan / Mission E, Tesla, ZOERepost

With living costs on the rise, getting a good deal on your next car is more important than ever. That’s where our Used Car Awards come in. These are our favourite electric cars…

Credit where credit is due: Elon Musk has led Tesla to become one of today’s most popular car brands. He’s no stranger to controversy in other matters, but Tesla’s Model 3 has proved to be an electric vehicle (EV) milestone.

This executive car has sold immensely well since its launch, and it continues to do so today, meaning the used market is flooded with them. Examples start with the Standard Range Plus, which can be found for a very tempting £23,000.

While this entry-level model can’t come close to matching the Performance’s 0-60mph time of 3.3sec (in our hands), it’ll still manage the sprint in a hot-hatch-like 6.1sec. You won’t see such acceleration behind the wheel of a Kia e-Niro.

The range is impressive, too: the Standard Range Plus officially travels 254 miles on a single charge, or 267 miles if you go for a post-2020 example. If you need 300-plus miles of range (more than any Jaguar I-Pace can offer), you can pick up a Model 3 Long Range or Performance for a few thousand pounds more; these versions have larger batteries.

The Model 3 is more reliable than the I-Pace, too. In the latest What Car? Reliability Survey, the Model 3 ranked eighth out of 20 cars in the EV class, with an impressive 93.9% score.

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Top Gear’s greatest cars of the last 30 years: BMW i8 and Porsche Taycan

November 9, 2023BMW, Electric Cars, News, Reviews and Comment, Porsche, Taycan / Mission ERepost

In our increasingly electrified world, two pioneers have stood taller than others

We were surprised as well. Only one Porsche has ever been crowned TG’s Car of the Year, and it’s the one without a combustion engine. Meanwhile, no BMW M car has ever taken the top prize. The only Beemers to walk away with the laurels are an executive saloon still held in high regard today, and a petrol-electric sports car that bravely looked to a future that hasn’t materialised. Raises the question really: which of this pair is a surefire future classic?

We know a winner when we see one. BMW’s £900m investment in its i range is now a cautionary tale of how to go too far, too fast with cars of the future, with the i3 and i8 now relegated to history and the current range taking the far more conventional shape of stuff like the iX1, i4 and i7. The only ‘bespoke’ EV BMW makes these days is the iX. A fine luxury pod dressed up like a robo-hippo, but a far cry from the days when bespoke aluminium chassis bore recycled carbon-fibre superstructures.

When aerodynamics, not marketing, styled the cars. When BMW would sell you a butterfly door streamliner powered by a 3cyl Mini engine tuned to deliver over 230bhp, boosted by an electric motor for 0–62mph in 4.4secs, plus claimed economy of 134mpg. Not the i8’s fault the test cycle was laughably flawed.

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Porsche Says Its EVs Will Soon Be More Profitable Than Its Gas-Powered Cars

August 5, 2022Electric Cars, News, Reviews and Comment, Porsche, Taycan / Mission E, UncategorizedRepost

Porsche expects that, within two years, its electric cars will be as profitable as its conventional cars, and that within five years, its electric cars will prove even more profitable.

Speaking at the company’s capital markets day, chief financial officer Lutz Meschke said that Porsche expects the margins on electric cars will equal and then surpass the margins on gas-powered cars as consumers grow more willing to pay for battery-powered vehicles, Bloomberg reports.

Until recently, automakers had lamented the thin profit margins on electric vehicles, which are more costly to manufacture and have historically held less appeal for consumers. Now, with EV manufacturing facilities scaling up and consumer interest on the rise, things are starting to change. “There are even signs that the EV business could be at least as good as the business with the conventional cars,” Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen Group, said in March.

Porsche expects that EVs will account for roughly half of the luxury car market by the end of this decade. The German automaker is aiming for 80 percent of its sales to be fully electric by 2031.

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What’s the best electric vehicle for shaming supercars?

February 25, 2022Electric Cars, News, Reviews and Comment, Porsche, Taycan / Mission ERepost

The Porsche Taycan Turbo S puts the ‘fast’ in ‘fasten your seatbelts’

It’s one of the best things about an electric car – that instant slug of full-on torque, wheels scrabble then the rubber bites into the road, none of the other drivers can see your Nissan Leaf for dust away from the traffic lights.

We might have laughed at all those Reva G-Wiz drivers weaving about the road into the paths of overtaking cyclists, hunched painfully behind the wheel, those hairiest of hair-shirted early adopters. But it’s clear now that these were performance pioneers, in the same way that someone taking a corner too fast in their Benz Patent-Motorwagen was setting us all inexorably on the road to world rally championships and Grand Prix glory.

And sure there have been upstarts and disrupters on the electric path so far, but of course we all knew that the big daddies of car making would come through with the sort of tech that would make others weep.

Porsche has spent decades and decades refining the 911 formula that people said couldn’t work. It positively crushed the naysayers under the bluff front end of its Cayenne performance SUV when they said that pseudo-4x4s were too dumpy to drive well.

Latterly the Stuttgart-based firm has electrified us all with the delights of its Taycan EV, a car that juggles the old-fashioned dynamic delights of a Porsche with the brave new world of electromobility. Critics will wiffle on about the lack of engine noise and aural titivation, or they complain in the same whiny tones as an electric motor about the fact that the Taycan has a Turbo model in its line-up when it doesn’t even have a turbo in its engine. “Watt’s going on”, they say. “Ohmigod”, they cry.

Maybe the Taycan Turbo S doesn’t even have a turbo, but with 751bhp on overboost you definitely won’t even care. A 2.8secs 0–62mph run will leave most other drivers sobbing pathetically in its wake – it’s basically a bargain at £139k and the polar ice caps will practically refreeze themselves as you thunder along. What’s not to like? You’ll be the envy of all the sad chumps at the charge points.

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Porsche Taycan Turbo S 2020 review

October 10, 2019Electric Cars, News, Reviews and Comment, Porsche, Taycan / Mission ERepost

Range-topping version of Porsche’s first all-electric car shows the rest of the world how it should be done

What is it?

I think this handsome thing is the world’s best electric car. I suppose it should be, because the new Porsche Taycan, in toppermost Turbo S form, costs £138,826 before options – and you’ll need to specify some of those, as we’ll come to.

First, though: this electric car/Turbo combo. There’s something not quite right there, wouldn’t you say? Although Supercharger and Autopilot don’t seem to mean what I thought, either. Look, we all know Turbo is a sub-brand, not a literal thing, says Porsche. It means souped up, which is why there are Turbo versions of vacuum cleaners or already turbocharged 911s.

Figuratively, Turbo means chuffing powerful. The Taycan Turbo S figuratively and literally is that. It has 751bhp, albeit on overboost, for a few seconds, during launches, when it can hit 60mph from rest in 2.6sec. Even the regular Taycan Turbo (merely £115,828) has 670bhp in the same mode. Both, strangely, make 617bhp when you’re not launching.

Cheaper, less powerful, non-Turbo Taycans will follow, but when early adopters with heavy wallets are waiting, why offer those now?

This expensive market entry, then, is Porsche’s first pure EV, but the company has form with electricity via its hybrids, plugged in or otherwise, in road cars and motorsport. The Le Mans-winning 919 has been running an 800V electrical system since 2011 and the Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid is the kind of car we use on a drag race video when we want to give a Tesla Model S’s Ludicrous Mode a hard time.

The Taycan will be able to fill that brief without the Panamera’s internally combusted element. It’s a five-door hatchback, marginally smaller than a Panamera, built on a new platform, with a raft of lithium ion batteries beneath the floor. They total 93.4kWh, good enough for a WLTP range of up to 280 miles in the Turbo (which has an exceptional drag coefficient of 0.22) or 256 miles in the Turbo S (Cd 0.25).

There are two motors – one front, one aft – powering all four wheels. The rear motor has a two-speed transmission, although it drives around mostly in second gear, with the low ratio reserved for the sportier of its drive modes at lower speeds. The Turbo S gets active rear steer, carbon-ceramic brakes, a different inverter to allow the overboost and bigger wheels as standard, but generally the differences over the Turbo are limited.

Porsche changes its mind on electric vehicles, plans 50% of its production to be electric within 6 years

July 5, 2017Electric Cars, News, Reviews and Comment, Porsche, Taycan / Mission EJo

It wasn’t long ago that Porsche claimed all-electric powertrains didn’t offer enough performance to reach the level that their customers expect from the premium German brand.

As their work on their first all-electric vehicle progresses, they are now changing their view on the technology and CEO Oliver Blume now says that he expects half of Porsche’s production to be electric by 2023.

The Mission E will be Porsche’s first all-electric vehicle and it is planned to enter production in 2019.
Last year, Blume said that they were planning for an annual production of 20,000 units for the new vehicle. It’s a significant volume for the German automaker considering they delivered just over 230,000 vehicles worldwide last year across its entire lineup.

But now they are ready to crank it up with a second all-electric vehicle based on the Macan.
In a surprising move, The CEO now says that between the two vehicles, Porsche is preparing for a capacity of 60,000 cars per year at its Zuffenhausen plant. Blume made the comment to Germany’s business magazine Manager Magazin last week.

The capacity would quickly make electric vehicles an important part of its overall production and it explains why the CEO now sees them reaching 50% of its total production as soon as 2023, which is much sooner than any established automaker.