First Drive – New Porsche Taycan

Friday before last, my Porsche dealer buddy Rob Millar invited me over to drive the new all-electric Porsche Taycan. You may have seen this car advertised in Porsche’s really entertaining Super Bowl commercial. I’ve been very interested in this car ever since it was first introduced as the Mission E concept vehicle, and as the owner of five previous Porsches (four 911s and one 718 Boxster) I have seriously considered purchasing one. The model I drove is the Taycan Turbo (a silly moniker – Turbo – for a car that has no gas engine), one notch down from the top of the line Turbo S. Base price of the Turbo is $155K, and the model I drove stickered at around $175K. Not exactly an economy car!

I drove the car on the dealer’s standard neighborhood “test track,” up Woodward Avenue and then off into the twisties of Bloomfield Hills. The car is very well done, with standard Porsche interior treatments and appointments. I could see that one of Porsche’s priorities was to make the driving experience as similar to their gas engine cars as possible, and I think they achieved that. The car has great acceleration and handling, and I could easily see driving one every day, especially if the price was about half of what the sticker indicated. I’m not going to do a full review here, but I will have much more to say about my electric car experiences and opinions in an upcoming post. Stay tuned!

Thanks to Rob Millar and Fred Lavery Porsche for a fun afternoon with a great new vehicle. Kudos to Porsche for joining the electric car revolution in a really big way.