Electric cars for a road trip? Doesn’t that mean stopping every hour and tuning a reasonable drive into an all-day affair?
Not necessarily. EVs have been making big gains in short order. Tesla claims a 322-mile range for its Model 3. Even the latest Nissan Leaf can cover up to 226 miles on a charge.
Porsche recently invited us on …
And because I love you all, I snapped this during our second stop.
When do you give me this car for my birthday?
Fueled by Caffeine said:When do you give me this car for my birthday?
Sadly it's no longer in our care. We drove the one displayed in the PCA booth at the Rolex. Last I heard, Porsche was driving it back home on Monday. 
Does the concrete around the charging station smell like spilled electrons?
Woody said:Does the concrete around the charging station smell like spilled electrons?
A little.
What kind of sandwich did you get? 
In reply to slowbird :
Chicken.
Does it play glorious flat 6 noises through the stereo when you step on the go pedal?
Since you are a Porsche person.
If you had the money and could stomach the depreciation. This or a PanTurbo S wagon at around 170K and change with options.
In reply to wearymicrobe :
Both
ShinnyGroove said:Does it play glorious flat 6 noises through the stereo when you step on the go pedal?
Normally, no, but I believe engine noises can be called up.
wearymicrobe said:Since you are a Porsche person.
If you had the money and could stomach the depreciation. This or a PanTurbo S wagon at around 170K and change with options.
You know, that's a good quesiton--and was thinking about that last night. I'd love to drive both back-to-back. That might be a comparison for another day. As far as comfort and performance, the Taycan doesn't give up anything. I think it's more aggressive looking, too.
I think I read somewhere, or saw in a review video that Porsche had elected not to use regenerative braking, which might partially explain the shorter range. I only heard it once, and frankly it seems like an odd choice if true. Can you confirm or deny the presence of regen braking?
STM317 said:I think I read somewhere, or saw in a review video that Porsche had elected not to use regenerative braking, which might partially explain the shorter range. I only heard it once, and frankly it seems like an odd choice if true. Can you confirm or deny the presence of regen braking?
From the Porsche website:
Porsche Recuperation Management (PRM) works innovatively and can regenerate up to 90% of braking energy. This means, during active braking, recuperation is enabled first and the mechanical brake is only engaged when stronger braking is required – intelligently controlled by a braking system that is capable of blending. With an outstanding recuperation output of up to 265kW, energy can be fed back into the battery in the Taycan. Or to be more precise: during sporty, everyday driving, for example, you will achieve up to a third of your range exclusively from recuperation. With recuperation braking from 124 mph to 0, electrical energy can be recovered for a range of up to 2.5 miles.
It could also be that EVs are harder than it might appear on the surface, and while Porsche has been building sports cars for quite some time (as they will tell you) they're still newbies to this EV game.
About the "some cars charged faster than others" - check this picture. One charger has two cars on it, one has one. I know that in some cases, when you have multiple cars plugged into the same charger, they have to split the power.
Was the blue car the one that charged faster?
See the "3B" at the bottom of the Supercharger in the pic below? If someone had plugged into 3A, both cars would have experienced decreased charge speeds.
How can I maximize power and reduce charge time at a Supercharger?
Each charge post is labeled with a number and letter, either A or B (e.g. 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B). When possible, select a charge post with a unique number that is not currently connected to a vehicle. When a unique number isn’t available, the Supercharger cabinet has technology to share available power between charge posts A and B. To maximize power, park at a Supercharger shared with a car that is nearly done charging. For Superchargers in urban areas, there is no need to consider these suggestions, as those sites do not share available power; each car has dedicated power available.
EA chargers may be the same.
I know that Teslas will also pre-condition the battery to accept high charge rates when you use the navigation system to get there - ie, when the car knows there's a Supercharge coming. It would not surprise me to hear that Porsche does the same, but if you had a convoy of cars just following each other you wouldn't think to enter the charging station into the nav so the car wouldn't be prepared.
It would awesome if you could convince Porsche to loan you one for a week or two to get the real day-to-day experience. Everyone always obsesses over charging speeds and availability but most of the time it's just not an issue.
The Taycan will warm the battery before charging, if that's what you mean by preconditioning, and it's tied into the navi. It has multiple settings--like on, off, automatic. As we got close to the first stop, though, Tom realized that the automatic setting wasn't engaged. Did the battery fully warm up before our arrival? I honestly don't know. (Also, don't quote me on the specifics as Tom was working those controls while I was driving through a rain storm.)
We purposely staggered our departures so that we wouldn’t all arrive at the chargers at the same time--well, kinda. The white Turbo S caravanned with a 911, while our blue Turbo ran with a second blue Turbo. (That one wore Turbo S wheels.)
An Electrify America engineer meet us at the second stop to check on us. That's the stop in the above photo. It sounded like something wasn't up to spec, and I need to follow up with Porsche.
But, yeah, the main goal here was to show that it's not too hard to take an EV on a road trip--and cure my own range anxiety.
And this got me thinking. If a Model 3 can go 300+/- miles on a charge, that would work in my life. My commute is just 6 miles, but 300 miles would cover 99% of my needs--I could get from here to Orlando, Jax or Tampa and back. My longest regular drive is to see my parents: 350 or so miles. So I'd need one quick stop each way. I always stop once for gas on that trip.
And how far will the 2025 Model 3 go? And the Electrify America grid is, what, like not even two years old? Where will that be in 2025?
Things are happening. Quickly.
Yes, by preconditioning the battery I mean warming it. It may cool it on hot days, I'm not sure. You basically have to get the battery ready for what is really a pretty traumatic event. I don't know how long it takes - probably longer when driving through the rain in January than it would on a hot day in June. I know you can hear the Tesla doing it, it sounds like science fiction is happening under the car.
"Automatic" is interesting - if the car thinks you're going to Walmart, it warms the battery in case you'll feed it? Or does that mean it'll warm the battery if you put a charger in as the destination?
Fun fact: the charge cables on the high speed chargers are water cooled. There's that much energy being transferred.
Stopping once on a 350 mile trip isn't a hardship, really. So anything with 200+ miles of range would do that comfortably. You'd just have to make sure it was something that had access to a fast charger at that halfway point.
I'm assuming the Taycan is like a Model 3 on the highway, remarkably serene because you've lost all that engine noise. Might be less obvious on a concrete highway, though!
It is a very cool time to be a car enthusiast.
"Automatic" in that it knows if you're heading to a charger en route to your final destination. But I should confirm this with Tom. I was just the loose nut behind the wheel.
Yes, I learned about the water-cooled cables. With the EA chargers, you can hear the pump.
And, yeah, I'm not going 300+ miles without stopping to pee.
Crazy what only 170 THOUSAND dollars will buy you these days. Robb Report is going to sell a crapton of these.
228 miles? Why not buy a fancy enclosed golf cart for trips to Starbucks and just take the private plane when you have to hit the road. That is the demographic being sought right?
I am sure these will be highly collectable and be listed at 20k over MSRP once they hit the used market.
Very excited to see the Taycan tested but kinda disappointed about a couple of items. Look, I get that Porsche needs to put some counter EPA info out there because of the low range, but this idea of not hypermiling but being ‘reasonable’ isn’t very descriptive of the limitations being placed on how the cars were driven. Perhaps the most egregious is the continued comparison to a 60k model 3 performance when the cheapest car in the comparison is 2x the price.
In reply to David S. Wallens :
So I'd love to hear what it's like using the car on a road trip without the Porsche and EA engineers along to guide you. The Tesla charging network is everywhere! The EA network, not so much. I am the target market for this car (literally, I own an i3 already), and no way I'd get it until I knew I could rely on their charging network.
I'm curious about who is checking the pay chargers for accuracy? Like the states do for gas pumps.
Dave M said:In reply to David S. Wallens :
So I'd love to hear what it's like using the car on a road trip without the Porsche and EA engineers along to guide you. The Tesla charging network is everywhere! The EA network, not so much. I am the target market for this car (literally, I own an i3 already), and no way I'd get it until I knew I could rely on their charging network.
I don't think the experience would have been much different if driving solo. Here's a photo of the navi screen. Our final destination was a hotel across from Daytona International Speedway. The blue flag shows the upcoming EA charging station in Lake City, Florida. It's blue because that's where we need to stop. The white flag in Jacksonville shows another EA station. It's white because we won't need to stop there since we can grab enough juice in Lake City to make it to our final destination.
Our friends from Porsche were mostly there to answer questions and show us how to plug in (and buy us a chicken sammich). We broke away from them on the final leg so we could find places to photograph the car. We got to the finish line (Daytona) totally okay.
The EA vs. Tesla situation is like the old VHS/Betamax. Which one do you want to commit to? Tesla's decision to create their own network has a lot of merit. What will things look like in five years? Will they control even more of the EV market? Or will upstarts and others chip away? Interesting times.
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