Porsche Taycan used to set new record for fastest coast-to-coast charging time

Jeff Glucker

/comment

Comments

When you drive the nearly 3,000 miles from Los Angeles to New York, you have to make a few stops. It doesn’t matter what type of vehicle you’re driving, you need to stop. In an electric car, you’re likely going to need to make a few longer stops to soak up some juice. And a driver in a 2021 Porsche Taycan just made the trip and managed to set a new Guinness World Record by spending the least amount of time charging up.

Previously, this record was seven hours, ten minutes, and one second. With the Taycan, driver Wayne Gerdes needed to charge for a total of two hours, 26 minutes, and 48 seconds. That’s a new record by a fairly massive margin. Though we think that some of the non-legal Cannonball runs likely used up shorter charging times, those are not recognized attempts by Guinness and are not as heavily documented as the drive done in the Taycan.

Gerdes needed to have independent witnesses at each charging stop. Every mile driven was filmed and GPS tracked. And the Taycan used is an unmodified example fitted with the Performance Battery Plus. It’s able to utilize 350-kW DC Fast Charging, and Gerdes noted that he saw it go from 6% to 82% in just 22 minutes.

Our trip time in 2019 in an Audi E-Tron

As someone who’s driven cross country in an EV, I can tell you that spending just two hours of total charging time for the drive sounds pretty amazing. When I was part of a trio that made a slightly longer version of the drive towards the end of 2019, our total drive time was just over 60 hours. Our moving time was 39 hours, so our time spent charging was… long. Getting the charging time down to less than 2.5 hours? I’m impressed.

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

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The maximum upload file size: 64 MB. You can upload: image, audio, video. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop files here

4 responses to “Porsche Taycan used to set new record for fastest coast-to-coast charging time”

  1. Neight428 Avatar
    Neight428

    Fast charger infrastructure (and the cars that are made for it) could unlock wider acceptance of EV’s once the whole price thing gets worked out.

    Reply
  2. Sjalabais Avatar
    Sjalabais

    That is wildly impressive, indeed. There’s still a lot of EV sceptics out there and the pendulum swings between muh range/booh charge/battery environmental impact. This one nixed two of those. I’m no expert on either topic, but actually utilizing the 350kW charge is an amazing feat. Imagine the cooling and delivery infrastructure necessary for this kind of power…

    Reply
    1. outback_ute Avatar
      outback_ute

      So many thoughts… firstly where is the lead photo taken? I wonder if that is a 350 kW charger because 8 of them (at least) is a lot; will make brownouts worse if nothing else.

      No wonder they have a roof over the chargers, would be worth removing sun load from the cooling demands. I also wonder what the cycle time is before the charger is ready to go again or can it run continuously?

      Also the Taycan looks like a chopped & channelled, kustom version of the last Beetle

      Reply
  3. bhtooefr Avatar
    bhtooefr

    I highly doubt that the non-legal runs used less charging time.

    If your goal is only to minimize charging time, you’ll try to get as much range as possible by using every hypermiling trick in the book, to minimize the number of times you have to charge.

    If your goal is to do the trip in as little time as possible, you’ll set a target speed based on how long it takes to charge and how much range you need to make it to your target charger. This will be much, much faster than a hypermiling pace, but you’ll use a lot more energy and spend more time charging. (Also, note that in most cases, you still won’t be driving at Vmax all the time, unless your chargers are very fast and your Vmax is low – there’s a point at which it’s slower to drive faster, due to aerodynamic drag increasing with the square of velocity, and charging being comparatively slow. And even then, some hypermiling techniques are still called for even at Vmax.)

    So, EV cannonballs will spend a lot more time charging than someone who’s a professional hypermiler.

    Reply