Electric Brewgaloo! Long-Distance Porsche Taycan beer run Pt. 2

Jeff Glucker

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Sometime last summer, I used a Porsche Taycan to go on a mini road trip in search of great beer. The Taycan 4S was an amazing machine and it left me wanting to sample the higher-spec versions of this all-electric Porsche. And that’s what’s happening here now. This is long-distance beer run part two and this time I’ve done it with the Taycan Turbo S.

This is a significant jump in power. The Taycan 4S with Performance Battery pack produces 562 horsepower. Here on the Turbo S, we’re dealing with 750 hp. That’s enough to rocket this thing from 0-60 miles per hour in around 2.5 seconds. It will get to 100 mph in 6 seconds. And it will make you smile and laugh anytime you mash the accelerator. As fun as it is, this Porsche is also wickedly expensive. The base price is around $186,000 and since this is Porsche, you can quickly push that price tag north of $200k. The good news is that the 4S is insane fun too for a more reasonable (relatively speaking) $105k. Additionally, Porsche now offers a rear-wheel-drive base level Taycan that starts a bit over $80k. It’s all a lot of money, of course, but it’s also one of the best cars I’ve ever driven.

If you want to see how it all went down with the Taycan 4S, you can watch that video here:

Porsche Taycan 4S – Long-Distance Beer Run!

More interesting though is the fact that Porsche is coming out with the wagon version of the Taycan, and it’s called the Taycan CrossTurismo. And yes… I am already scheming up routes for that one. It holds way more stuff, after all. Maybe an overnighter trip is in order with my mountain bike clamped to the roof? Or it’s time for a long-distance winery run? Either way, I’m paying close attention to that version.

[Disclaimer: Porsche tossed me the keys to the Taycan and included a fully charged battery pack.]

About

Jeff Glucker

Jeff Glucker

Jeff Glucker is the co-founder and Executive Editor of Hooniverse.com. He’s often seen getting passed as he hustles a 1991 Mitsubishi Montero up the 405 Freeway. IG: @HooniverseJeff

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9 responses to “Electric Brewgaloo! Long-Distance Porsche Taycan beer run Pt. 2”

  1. Neight428 Avatar
    Neight428

    What with the whole ERCOT Texas grid fiasco, I’ve recently become more attuned to the practical application of kilowatts. I’ve learned that a 20 kw standby generator can run a moderately sized house if you don’t push it by running an electric stove, oven and a/c at the same time. So, when I hear that a Taycan can be charged 75% in 22 minutes running the load that would otherwise service 12 houses cooking family dinners, it starts to sound a lot less efficient. If you load up a charging station along the interstate to enable long distance road trips with 10 of these 270 kw chargers, you just built the electric grid equivalent of a 120 house subdivision.

    Or, to put it another way, for each fast charger, you would need two of these:

    https://www.globalpwr.com/products-page/diesel-generators/caterpillar-150-kw-aps150/

    Or for your 10 charger station, you would need two of these:

    General Electric – 1.5 MW Series

    The amount of infrastructure it will take to convert any substantial proportion of the private vehicle fleet to all electric would be mind boggling.

    Reply
    1. Neight428 Avatar
      Neight428

      All that said, if I had the money, I’d have the wagon version of this car before any of the top end big car options out there. Looks crazy awesome.

      Reply
    2. Sjalabais Avatar
      Sjalabais

      But doesn’t it make a difference looking at fast charging and the more mundane trickle charge at home? I know Norway has an insane electricity consumption per capita (roughly twice of the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption), but even with that in mind, after years of good EV sales and about a year of national >50% EV sales, resulting in 300k cars in a nation of 6 million people, overall electricity consumption for EV charging has barely reached an estimated 0.5% of overall production: https://www.tu.no/artikler/sa-mye-strom-brukte-elbilene-i-fjor/507227

      With the crisis in Texas in mind, imagine being prepared with a car that allows you to use its battery with an ordinary household plug (like the Honda e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeDKGw87FvQ). Even 20 kWh would have been helpful, but fancy EVs have 4-5 times that capacity. Say you’re going nowhere during a crisis like that but have your car charged somewhere between 80-100%. That is a few days with quite normal appliance use, if you heat with firewood. In a bright and awesome future of solar panels on every roof, especially in places like Texas, a decentralized source of energy like that would be amazing to have.

      Reply
      1. Neight428 Avatar
        Neight428

        Very nice backup to have, in fact, the new F150’s have a top of the line hybrid model that someone locally used to power their whole house for a while. If you have natural gas for heat (a lot of us do) and something to turn the forced air fan and run the thermostat, you can keep your house warm on minimal KW’s.

        If you use electricity for heating more universally, that’s probably the difference, we have a lot of people on natural gas, propane, and fuel oil for heat.

        For actual normal use, the math isn’t so harsh. A standard household spec 240 V charger can probably take care of most commuters. I had just never quantified just how much juice a fast charger would take, and in places where fast chargers would be essential, what that would mean for infrastructure.

        Reply
        1. Sjalabais Avatar
          Sjalabais

          Yeah, the biggest issue with fast chargers is transmission capacity, not production per se. We’re connected to the Bergen city grid and get the spikes related to people who just warm up cars (and take showers, boil coffee etc.), as well as plug in cars after work. Our house electricity management avoids those spikes; e.g. I have the warm water heater on a Hue routine, clothes and dishes get washed at night, the car starts charging at 11 pm etc. Potential savings are significant:
          https://ibb.co/album/wc4Rrh
          Imagine how lovely this would work with a proper battery setup.

          The guy with the hybrid; does that require home-made adjustments or do they come with an outlet, too? I am honestly deeply optimistic about decentralised grids and smart electricity controls. This will work out just fine.

          Reply
          1. Neight428 Avatar
            Neight428

            It would require a transfer switch and plug to pull from an off grid source. They are not standard issue by any means, but nothing exotic.

  2. Zentropy Avatar
    Zentropy

    I would much prefer that the new EV tech be introduced in more mainstream, accessible designs rather than the uber-lux hyperformers. I might actually warm up to EVs if they had lower price tags, (relatively) light curb weights, more modest performance limits, etc., though my biggest personal barrier is my aversion to FWD and automatic transmissions, which seem to be the norm among proletarian electric offerings.

    Reply
    1. Jeff Glucker Avatar
      Jeff Glucker

      That Hyundai Ioniq 5 looks pretty great. Volkswagen needs to do an update to the Golf EV. The Mustang Mach-E looks intriguing. And I think it will be cool when this tech filters over to off-road capable machines as well. A Bronco Sport EV would be pretty cool.

      Reply
    2. Tiller188 Avatar
      Tiller188

      You’re not wrong, but I can see the business case for doing things the way that automakers currently are. I’ll admit that I thought Tesla was fairly clever for starting their brand with a 2-seat sporty roadster, then moving to a fancy-ish sedan, before attempting a mass-market (-ish) model. Establishing a halo car first, which sort of inherently comes with higher gross margin potential, makes a lot of sense for a relatively unproven tech that doesn’t yet have economies of scale going for it. Granted, that should be getting to be less and less of a problem, but the fact remains that electric cars were, and to some extent still are, the purview of early adopters and techies. Perhaps there’s a chicken-and-egg argument to be made here (“if automakers would make more-reasonably-priced electric cars, they wouldn’t HAVE to be early-adopter toys!”), but considering range anxiety and charging infrastructure concerns, it was always going to be a gradual switchover process, so taking full advantage of that by making relatively low-production, high-margin, exclusive electric models seems like a sound strategy. I am curious to know how well the Leaf worked out for Nissan in a pure business sense; they were one of the first “accessible” electric models of the “current-generation” of electric cars (as opposed to 90s-era efforts like the EV1, nevermind the electric cars from the early days of the automobile), but that came along with range compromises that not as many people were willing to make, and I’m curious to what extent that defeated the purpose of having a more easily-accessible pricetag.

      I still subscribe to the Motor Trend paper magazine (“You mean you have to use your hands [to turn the pages]? That’s like a baby’s toy!”), and there were a couple of quite-interesting tech articles in recent issues about advances in solid-state battery tech and methods for improving the energy efficiency of relatively-simple, industrial-style electric motors. It’s starting to look like economies of scale and more-affordable models are on their way, and I’m already impressed with the progress that’s been made (the original Chevy Bolt was, at least on paper, quite a feat, I thought), but I’m not sure we’d have gotten there without the flashy, big-bucks, exclusive electric cars making a splash, earning their makers a bunch of money, and making electric cars sexy.

      Then again, my current garage consists of a WRX and a Genesis G70, both manual, so rather literally I know not of what I speak.

      Reply