Goodbye
As the Porsche Taycan departs, we’ll miss the bewitching way it combines ease of use with brilliant handling.
While I’ll miss the Taycan – it is a Porsche, after all – it’s what it represents that I’ll miss more.
The ease of use over many guiltfree miles will be my abiding memory. Because while every non-EV owner obsesses about range and charging and cold weather and weight and cost, the reality is that a good EV is brilliant at making your life easier. As an item of personal mobility, that gets you from A to Bwith no fuss, it’s great.
I’m lucky in that I have a charger at home and at the office. The car has to fit your lifestyle, but then that’s no different if you need a diesel – what the Taycan offered me personally was a superb car that covered 99 per cent of my journeys with zero fuss. And when it didn’t, like on a round-trip to Reading or Castle Combe, I just spent five minutes before I left planning a charge and timed it to work around my day.
The Stuttgart element is the icing on the cake – it’s what transforms the Taycan from white good to much, much more, elevating it above the mundanity that afflicts a lot of EVs. The fundamentals of the recipe are spot-on – electric propulsion, quick charging speed, low-slung estate shape – and then that’s sprinkled with a dash of Porsche specialness.
Four years on, it’s still our favourite electric car. It’s the way it gives enough feedback and has sufficient handling nuance that makes it feel different to others out there.
The BMW i3 had it as well. That sense of being special to sit in, and of having approached the problem from a novel angle, led by engineers. The Taycan’s 800-volt
