R&S Pride JAN 210 MANDY FILLED.qxp 25/11/2019 14:31 Page 155
You’ll be quite ‘Taycan’ with the prospect of owning this month’s featured motor. at’s because Porsche is taking on Tesla with a four door, four seater super-saloon to rival Elon Musk’s Model S model. How does Porsche’s new Taycan stack up? Brilliantly. In fact, it may be the best electric car on the market today! Words: Rob Davis.
RIGHT NOW, I’m writing this on an Apple iMac computer. We’ve been using them in publishing since the 1980s, because back when Microsoft Windows had yet to be invented and most computers’ interfaces were indecipherable screens of text and obscure commands, Macs were different. ey had icons, menus and you could use a ‘mouse’ to draw on screen. It made the Apple Mac computer far easier to use than its rivals and especially suitable for graphics and publishing. Many think that Apple invented the mouse but in fact, the boss of Apple at the time, one Steve Jobs, saw it demonstrated at Xerox, and... well... nicked the idea. How on earth does this relate to the new Porsche Taycan, the firm’s all-new, all-electric sports saloon? Well, Apple didn’t invent the mouse, nor were they first to market. ey did, however, execute the technology better than any of their rivals. Likewise, Tesla was first to market with a modern, four-door, all-electric sports saloon, with the first European deliveries in 2013. Porsche’s Taycan may be late to the party, but it’s a better executed and much more desirable product. Sound familiar? e idea of a four-door Porsche was ridiculed, until the Panamera proved everyone wrong, selling about 10,000 a year in the US alone. And though the Panamera was also available as a hybrid, the new Taycan is the first
Porsche designed from the ground up as an electric car, which makes it the first in a completely new generation of car from the venerable sports car manufacturer. ree models are available. ere’s a Turbo (680ps power, £115,858), and a Turbo S 761ps, £138,826). e nomenclature is a bit misleading, given the fact that neither model has an internal combustion engine, let alone a turbocharger. Newly released though is the entry level model, the Taycan 4S. Entry level sounds a bit dispassionate, but in fact the 4S is still good for 530ps. For comparison, a Range Rover Sport with a 5.0V8 supercharged engine generates 525ps. Charge the car up and you’ll drive anywhere from 206 to 252 miles and of course you’ll emit not a single gram of carbon. Best of all the 4S undercuts the other models in the Taycan range, costing £83,367. Whilst that remains a considerable sum of money, it’s cheaper than either of the Turbo models, and should be cheaper to run than a petrol or diesel car, especially as a company car, which serves to offset that price further. Stylistically the Taycan is close to the Panamera, albeit a little smoother and with sleeker flush door handles. Blue is rapidly being adopted as the indicative colour of their electric vehicles, and you may prefer the optional Frozen Blue rather than the white of our demo car. >>
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