The unveil of the fully finished, production-ready Porsche Taycan is nearly upon us as the Zuffenhausen-based automaker wraps up a comprehensive test campaign in a variety of climates to test the fully electric vehicle’s endurance and fortitude against some of the harshest real-world conditions on Earth.
Porsche’s test team takes the Taycan through the barren Scandinavian wilderness to within a few kilometres away from the Arctic Circle while sets of shadow teams take other sets of Taycans to Dubai for hot-climate endurance runs and testing battery charging under extreme conditions, and to South Africa for performance and reliability trials.
“After carrying out computer simulations and comprehensive bench tests early on, we have now reached the final phase of this demanding testing programme,” underlines the vice president of the model line, Stefan Weckbach.
Before the Taycan is launched on the market at the end of the year, we will have covered approximately six million kilometres across the globe. We are already very happy with the current status of the vehicles. The Taycan is going to be a true Porsche,” he added.
Porsche says that expect the Taycan to be subjected to the same kinds of pre-production testing that would be expected of their combustion-powered cars, without exception. So far, the collective fleet Taycans have covered more than 6 million kilometres with 2 million of those being dedicated endurance runs.
These, the team of around 1,000 test drivers covered 30 countries such as the aforementioned South Africa and Dubai, but also China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Finland, spanning a temperature range between -35 degrees to 50 degrees Celsius up to an altitude of 3,000 metres above sea level.
The batteries in these cars have undergone charge cycles in all these conditions for a collective charge/discharge count of over 100,000 using a variety of different electric vehicle infrastructures. This is particularly good news for prospective buyers, as 20,000 people have already put money down to be one of the earliest adopters of Porsche’s first full EV.
With this timeline in place, there’s little doubt that Porsche is preparing to unveil the finished Taycan at this year’s Frankfurt Motor Show in September, the same venue the Mission E (its conceptual precursor) was shown for the first time.
Even though we’re only months away, Porsche is still keeping the finer details on the car close to its vest. However, we are certain that its dual-motor powertrain will be good for around 447kW and supplied by a 100kWh battery array that can take it as far as 500km on a single charge. It’ll be pretty rapid both off the line and in corners too with 3.5 seconds being the estimate for its 0-100km/h sprint and with Porsche themselves setting a Nurburgring lap time under 8 minutes.
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