Electric Father Land

Porsche’s 2020 Taycan electric has its sights set on Tesla.

- Dave VanderWerp

The Taycan, Porsche’s pivotal step into the high-performance and high-price end of the EV landscape, is quick, comfortable, and likely to be a serious Tesla contender. The Taycan (pronounced TIE-kahn) is at least as important to Porsche as the first-generation Cayenne, not in terms of profit, but for reshaping the arc of the company’s future vehicles.

The automaker was determined not to do an electric SUV, and it knew a sports car wouldn’t be able to sell in high enough numbers to satisfy global regulatory requirements. So Porsche landed on a fastback-sedan configuration. The Taycan is very nearly the same length as a Tesla Model S and 3.4 inches shorter than the Panamera, but it has a substantially lower roofline than either. But Tesla certainly deserves credit for doing the very expensive, money-losing research that’s proved there’s a market for luxury EVs. And sure enough, Porsche had 30,000 orders in hand globally even before the Taycan’s public debut.

Electric-vehicle breakthroughs include a much higher operating voltage that enables faster charging as well as the first multispeed EV transaxle. Both of this help facilitate uncharacteristically consistent acceleration performance for an EV.

Porsche is sticking with its traditional naming convention, calling these high-power models Turbo and Turbo S even though, obviously, neither has a turbocharger. This also means that it’s fairly easy to imagine how the bottom end of the model line will fill in later, with commensurately lower power figures and prices.