Tesla might still be the most popular EV maker, but Porsche wants to take on the company more seriously in the performance luxury space. The company’s latest version of the Taycan, its electric sports car, is an impressive jump in both range and charging speeds.
In a blog post, Porsche announced its new Taycan can achieve a range of 364 miles. That represents a huge increase, considering the currently available model can only reach upwards of 246 miles of range. Kevin Giek, Vice President for the model line at Porsche, said in a statement that the company was able to achieve this range through its “fast travel” strategy.
“For the particularly efficient Taycan sports saloon with the large battery, this practical, final test resulted in a total range of up to 587 kilometres. A great result. The range test in Southern California impressively demonstrated how efficient the reworked Taycan is. We are continuing to focus on our ‘fast travel’ strategy for electric mobility: short charging stops paired with high real-world ranges thanks to efficient drives.”
Of course, this range was achieved using the larger Performance Battery Plus model of the Taycan, so be ready to pay for it if you want that extended range. In addition to the longer range, the company has also seriously upgraded the charging speeds that the Taycan is capable of. In a report from Autocar, the new version took just 14 minutes to charge from 6% capacity to 80% capacity — that’s nuts.
The cars were charged at the Electrify America Charger in Torrance/Los Angeles. Here, the Taycan demonstrated over 300 kW charging power for many minutes and was able to charge from 10 to 80 per cent state of charge several times in well under 20 minutes. The charging performance, charging time and the time it takes to start charging were also greatly improved in this test.
The Taycan starts at $90,000, so it competes most closely with Tesla’s Model S Plaid model, which starts at $86,000. Tesla’s Plaid model gets an estimated 320 miles of range, so it looks like Porsche might finally pass Tesla in this area.
The announcement comes about a month after it was revealed that Porsche will be one of the first carmakers to feature Apple’s next-generation Carplay in models later this year.
