Porsche Taycan gets closer

Porsche Taycan, the company’s first battery-electric car will inspire a flood of new zero-emission sports cars when its full production begins late next year (2019).

The first product of an astonishing €6b ($A9.74b) investment program between now and the end of 2022, the Porsche Taycan (pronounced “tie-can”) will be smaller than the current Panamera and will be priced between the big liftback and the Cayenne SUV.

Porsche has already announced that the Taycan will be spun off into at least one other model (shown at this year’s Geneva motor show as the Audi Allroad-style Mission E Cross Turismo concept), but it will also be made in both all-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive.

The Taycan will also be built in right-hand drive from the start of production.

The good news is its final design is incredibly faithful to the stunning Mission E concept car, with the most notable change being the addition of a conventional B-pillar to improve its crash performance.

The Taycan has already reached its second level of pilot build production in the same hall that produced the 918 Spyder, and Porsche has designed and built a new €700m facility, scattered around its bulging Zuffenhausen headquarters, to build it.

The new factory within a factory dots the body, paint and axle shops around Porsche’s existing site and connects them to the four-level assembly plant via a 900m covered conveyer.

Due in Australia in 2020, the Taycan will compete not only with the Tesla Model S, but with the faster e-tron GT from sister brand Audi and Mercedes-Benz’s upcoming EQS, which will feature Benz’s first dedicated EV platform.

While the initial Porsche Taycans will use all-wheel drive, there will also be a rear-drive variant. Porsche plans to use its power electronics to make the car handle more like a rear-drive car than an all-wheel drive model.

While its sister Audi brand chose asynchronous electric motors for its e-tron, Porsche went for permanent-magnet synchronous electric motors mounted on the axles.

Porsche claims its motor design allows for sustained high performance with higher energy density. The design is similar to its 919 Hybrid Le Mans winner.

The motors’ solenoid coils use rectangular wiring, rather than the traditional round shape, allowing Porsche’s engineers to package them inside a smaller space for the same or higher power outputs.

“We started this in 2014 and it opened up a new chapter in Porsche history. It’s a dream job and I don’t know if there’s anything like that in the rest of the industry,” the Taycan’s Complete Vehicle Model Line Director, Robert Meier, said.

“It’s not straight forward otherwise it wouldn’t have taken so long. The targets were: 0-100km/h in less than 3.5sec; 600hp; more than 500km of range.

“An asynchronous motor has the benefit of being cheaper but it has one big disadvantage: you can briefly overload the battery but if you do this multiple times you can feel the reduction of performance of the motor.

“If you want to have frequent performance, the permanent synchronous motor is lighter and smaller and more power density,” Meier explained.

Meier insisted the Taycan’s handling would be sparkling, with a centre-of-gravity 80mm lower than the 911’s.

Porsche Taycan uses 400 lithium-ion pouch battery cells, combined in both serial and parallel connections for 800V, capable of delivering 100km of charging range in just four minutes without compromising the battery life.

“It has 300kW of charging power without hurting the battery, which you won’t find in our competitors.

“We switched it to 800V because we have recognised that if you look at the charging power, it’s the limiting factor today. If you increase voltage by the same power, you double charging capacity, Meier commented.

“If you look at the time necessary to recharge 100km, it’s about 10 minutes today, but it will go down to eight minutes -- but we will be down to four minutes. We want to drive fast and recharge fast,” he said.

While it’s famous for developing its own in-house powertrains, Porsche has gone outside for its battery packs, which it assembles from cells provided by LG.

“There is still a lot of room for development in batteries,” Porsche’s board member for Production and Logistics, Albrecht Reimold, said.

“There is still a big leap in future development and this is why we decided not to go in to that technology internally.”

Porsche will also offer an inductive charging system, though it won’t be available from the launch of the Taycan.

“We have an inductive charging efficiency of higher than 95 per cent. About 97 per cent,” Michael Kiefer, Porsche Engineering’s head of high voltage systems, insisted.

“We do not really know when we are going to have SOP [start of production] on inductive charging.

“There will also be DC charge boxes, which are battery boxes that can discharge faster than AC and can then be recharged slower by AC, and they’ll be in 600 Porsche dealers worldwide. They will also be available for other sites, because they charge cars faster than AC.

“It will charge three Taycans with it before it needs to recharge. If we have a low-power AC grid, it’s really helpful. It’s two-way, too, so it will feed back into the grid if it’s helpful,” Kiefer explained.

Porsche will offer the Taycan in a range of power outputs, as Tesla does, peaking at 450kW for its initial run of production cars, with 300kW, 350kW and 400kW units set to follow.

Taycan sends this performance to the wheels via a two-speed transmission (the e-tron, the Jaguar I-Pace and Tesla use single-speed units) and torque vectoring will be standard across the board.

It’s shorter than it looks in photos, but will still stretch to about 4850mm long and 1990mm wide, making it almost 200mm shorter than the Panamera but 53mm wider. It’s also shorter, but wider, than the Model S.

The details are stunning and highlight Porsche’s obsession with keeping the Taycan’s centre-of-gravity low and its handling within Porsche’s normal specifications, despite an estimated weight of around 2000kg.

The boot is short, but it houses a deep luggage compartment that looks a bit like a frunk at the back. A 100-litre frunk sits beneath the bonnet.

The interior will be dominated by a huge, curved digital instrument cluster, developed from the Volkswagen Touareg’s Innovision infotainment screen, but much larger, oval-shaped and used as the driver’s primary screen instead.

There will also be a near full-width digital screen reaching across the dashboard for the passenger, plus a high, floating centre console with storage space beneath it.

Porsche is already believed to be well advanced with both coupe and convertible Taycan variants, too, though there’s no word on when the first of the extra body styles will arrive.

The Porsche is scarcely related to the Audi e-tron, which is based on the C-Bev architecture developed at Ingolstadt. The Taycan sits on its own in-house J1 architecture, built from high-strength steel, carbon-fibre and aluminium, which will be used only for the Taycan and its variants, plus the e-tron GT.

It does, though, form the basis of the PPE (Premium Platform Electric) EV architecture that will be used across all of the Volkswagen Group’s premium brands, including Audi, Lamborghini, and Bentley; and possibly even Bugatti.

It has a long wheelbase for its overall length, with an incredibly short rear overhang. Porsche also slashed battery capacity from inside the battery pack to create what it calls “foot garages” for the rear passengers. The rear seat pans in the 4+1 arrangement are moulded into the body itself, so the seat hip point will be very low.

Porsche plans only a production rate of 20,000-25,000 Taycans a year (about eight per cent of its current volume) from its hemmed-in production site, though its director of Finance and IT, Lutz Meschke, admits there are contingency plans in case of a “Euphoria Moment”.

Those plans include spilling some production to Audi’s Böllinger Höfe e-tron (and R8) plant near Neckarsulm, even though Porsche’s spill production has traditionally moved to Valmet in Finland.

Porsche has pulled in more than 1200 new staff to build the car, but will send 300 of its most experienced 911 production workers across to the Taycan to instill the Porsche culture in the newcomers.