Porsche's Taycan Won't [Totally] Break the Bank

Porsche's Taycan Electric will be fast, quiet, and under $100,000.

On Wednesday, Porsche announced that it was to price its new four-door electric sports car, the Taycan (originally called the Mission E0, at $92,500. The four-door Taycan is priced between the Panamera and Cayenne, which are both also four-door vehicles. The German automaker believes that if the Taycan is priced this way, they will be able to move upwards of 20,000 units annually. They expect this to be a challenge in an increasingly crowded performance electric space.

"Taycan" is Turkish for "lively young horse," and the Porsche Taycan is expected to be more sports car than sedan, with a rakish coupe roof. It is electric, but not at all slow as it boasts two permanently excited synchronous motors that generate more than 600 horsepower. The Taycan can reach 155 mph, and accelerating from zero to 62 mph takes just 3.5 seconds. In the initial European testing, the car's range was more than 310 miles.

Stefan Weckbach, who’s in charge of developing the Taycan range, said in an interview on the company website, “It was clear from the beginning that an electrically powered Porsche—like every other Porsche model—must be the sportiest vehicle in its segment… It’ll clearly be a Porsche at first glance, because we’ve transferred the design DNA of Porsche to our future electric vehicles.”

According to Sam Abuelsamid, an auto analyst at Navigant Research, the price is not unexpected. “It really needs to be in this range to be competitive with the Tesla Model S,” he tells Penta. “Granted, this is a Porsche, so it should be possible to drive the price up considerably through the options list.”

The Taycan will have an approximately 90-kilowatt-hour battery, with 400 cells. Using a 350-kilowatt charging station, Porsche says it can add 62 miles of range in four minutes. That very fast charging—which could add 248.5 miles of range in 15 minutes—is made possible by the VW-funded Electrify America initiative, which is planning installations at 300 highway locations “from 2019.”

By the end of June 2019, Electrify America, which is investing $2 billion over 10 years, said it will be able to supply an interconnected network of about 12,500 chargers. Porsche is also looking at wireless charging—via a floor-mounted plate—for the Taycan.

Porsche says it will invest $6.8 billion in going electric by 2022—double its original estimate. As much as $573 million will go to developing variations on the Taycan. A higher-performance version could be priced at $229,000, Lutz Meschke, Porsche’s chief financial officer, told Automotive News Europe. Some$1.14 billion will go to electrify and hybridize the existing product line. And $800 million will be spent on such technologies as charging infrastructure and smart mobility.

In the Volkswagen Group’s electric plans, Porsche’s Taycan complements the Audi e-tron, a luxury battery SUV that arrives next year; and, from VW itself, the I.D. CROZZ (a crossover SUV, due out in 2020), and I.D. BUZZ (a reinterpretation of the Microbus, aimed at 2022). Both VWs will be built in the U.S.