We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Learn more ›
Porsche Taycan project lead Stefan Weckbach insists that the company’s upcoming electric Taycan model will be a Porsche at heart because of the attention paid to how it handles.
“The Taycan drives like a Porsche, looks like one, and feels so—except that he [sic] just has another drive[train]. Even an electric sports car can be purist and highly emotional,” Weckbach told German outlet Firmen Auto.
“This is not a contradiction for us. The underbody battery, for example, gives the car an extremely low center of gravity, it is even lower than the 911. In combination with an optimal weight distribution, the Taycan is therefore already very sporty created by the basic concept [sic].”
Porsche has built the Taycan to tackle the likes of the Tesla Model 3 Performance and Model S P100D, two of the leading electric enthusiast vehicles on the market. The automaker revealed in July that the Taycan will have an 800-watt drivetrain that powers a permanent magnet electric motor on each axle, unlike Tesla’s products which use a permanent magnet rear motor and an AC induction front motor. Permanent magnet motors tend to be more efficient under heavy load, and AC induction motors shine during cruising, hence Porsche’s exclusive use of permanent magnet motors.
“On the one hand, we opted for the choice of traction motors for permanent-magnet synchronous machines, which enable high continuous power and thus ensure reproducible performance. This means that they can accelerate not just once but several times in a row,” said Weckbach of the Taycan’s performance. Porsche has previously stated that the Taycan will have over 600 horsepower, allowing its all-wheel-drive to launch it from 0 to 60 in under 3.5 seconds. As seen in Tesla’s products, this generates colossal waste heat, to which Porsche had to find a solution.
“The same applies to driving at a constant high speed. On the other hand, we have developed an intelligent cooling system that prevents potential power losses due to excessive heat generation by always delivering cooling power exactly to those components that you need.”
Porsche is expected to share the Taycan’s platform with at least one Volkswagen Auto Group marque. The Audi Sport e-Tron GT concept coming next week at the Los Angeles Auto Show will ride on the Taycan’s platform, and it is reported to underpin the first Bentley EV as well. Porsche will reportedly take responsibility for VW AG’s premium brands in January of 2019, giving it control of Bugatti, Bentley, and Lamborghini.
Lamborghini CEO Stefano Domenicali hinted in a recent interview that the company could market an Espada-like electric GT car within a decade, so given the conglomerate’s apparent willingness to propagate the Taycan platform far and wide, it may not be unreasonable to expect Taycan DNA to show up in Lamborghini’s next GT car.
