Porsche Taycan Slapped With Disappointing 201-Mile EPA Range Estimate

For the last few years, Tesla has owned the high-performance electric vehicle market. Even the company’s mid-range Tesla Model 3 has better acceleration and a higher top speed than some more expensive gasoline-powered sports cars. Porsche, not accustomed to being outperformed by a cheaper car, is preparing to release the all-electric Taycan in 2020. However, EPA mileage testing showed surprisingly poor performance. It was so bad, in fact, that Porsche hired a private firm to do additional tests.
The Porsche Taycan sounds impressive on paper. It’s a 4-door sedan about the same size as the Tesla Model S. It features two electric motors with 523 horsepower in the base model. The top-of-the-line Taycan Turbo S has a whopping 751 horsepower with a maximum speed of 162 mph. Porsche also offers a up to 93.4 kWh of battery capacity in the Turbo and Turbo S variants.
As Porsche gets ready for launch, the EPA has completed its testing. Unfortunately for Porsche, the agency strongly disagrees with its claim that the Taycan can run for around 265 miles on a charge. The EPA reports the Taycan Turbo manages just 201 miles with that huge 93.4 kWh lithium-ion cell. To put that in context, the most expensive Tesla Model S with a similarly sized battery manages 315-370 miles on a charge, according to the EPA.

This puts the Taycan behind virtually all other electric cars, including the Tesla Model 3, Chevy Bolt, Nissan Leaf, and Jaguar I-Pace. Granted, some of those cars focus on efficiency rather than power, but the Taycan is a luxury vehicle that starts at around $100,000. It shouldn’t be that much worse than the competition.
The EPA numbers were so bad that Porsche hired vehicle testing firm AMCI to conduct a new assessment. The results of that test look much better for Porsche, showing a range of 275 miles. AMCI says its testing more accurately replicates real-world conditions, but this isn’t much help for Porsche. It still has to report the official EPA numbers to buyers, and it makes the Taycan look like it’s lagging behind the competition. The EPA is conservative when it comes to EV mileage ratings, but other carmakers have figured out how to get well above 200 miles in testing.
Continue reading

Protect Your Online Privacy With the 5 Best VPNs
Investing in a VPN is a smart choice right now, but the options are vast. To help narrow things down a bit, we've rounded up five of our very favorite consumer services.

RISC-V Tiptoes Towards Mainstream With SiFive Dev Board, High-Performance CPU
RISC V continues to make inroads across the market, this time with a cheaper and more fully-featured test motherboard.

The PlayStation 5 Will Only Be Available Online for Launch Day
The PlayStation 5 isn't going to be available in stores on launch day, and if you want to pick up an M.2 SSD to expand its storage, you'll have some time to figure out that purchase.

ARMing for War: New Cortex-A78C Will Challenge x86 in the Laptop Market
ARM took another step towards challenging x86 in its own right with the debut of the Cortex-A78C this week. The new chip packs up to eight "big" CPU cores and up to an 8MB L3 cache.