First ride: Porsche Taycan development prototype

The first surprise is how small the Taycan feels. Because it’s a four-door car and because you know there’s a more off-road-oriented ‘Cross Turismo’ version coming, you mentally file it somewhere between a Porsche Panamera and a Porsche Macan. Or at least I did. But that’s not how it feels. No official dimensions have yet been issued but, based on what is known from the Mission E concept from which it is derived, the car is around 4.85 metres long, compared with well over five metres for the Panamera. Its wheelbase is far shorter too – not Porsche 911 short, of course, which only manages occasional rear seats and positions its engine outside the wheelbase, but short enough that with four-wheel steering it changes direction with startling alacrity. 

Behind the wheel, it feels far closer to a 911 than a Panamera. The driving position is low, the centre console rising up commandingly beside you. As a result, it is very much a car you sit in, like a sports car, rather than on, like a family car. And that is entirely deliberate: Porsche knows it has a job on its hands convincing the world that electric cars and sporting cars are not diametrically opposed objectives, and if it can create the ambience of a 911 it will have gone some distance towards nailing that challenge. And even in the disguised prototypes in which I travelled, I can say with certainty that this at least has been achieved. 

So Christian and I head out into a blizzard. As far as I can see, it’s a complete white-out, as disorienting as flying a light aircraft through cloud, but he pretty much lives up here over the winter and does not let such trifles bother him. A barely discernible track has been cut into the snow so he goes to work, apparently guided by bat-like sonar. 

Would you be surprised if I told you the Taycan sounded like it had a cross-plane V8 under the bonnet? Me too. It hasn’t and it doesn’t. Porsche is big on authenticity and it sounds like an electric car because that’s what it is. The strategy will be to engineer out as many of the whines and whirrs of these very early prototypes so there is as little sound as possible. It’s “the luxury of silence”, as one Porsche person put it to me. I expect we’ll hear rather a lot of that particular soundbite in the near future. Oddly enough, therefore, there will be an additional and optional ‘sound pack’ customers can choose, but more of that later. 

The car I’m in is the top-of-the-range model but the truth is that it has snowed for much of the night and a Fiat Panda 4x4 would probably be able to spin all four wheels on the surface that has been left, so at least half of the 600bhp-plus at Christian’s disposal is superfluous to our needs. 

No matter. The car feels spectacularly composed with all of its electronic safety equipment turned on. I get Christian to do a full-bore standing start and the car just accelerates away as if on Tarmac, and not at all slowly. Put it this way: an original Boxster on a dry road would have no chance against this thing on snow. In Sport Plus mode, the car maintains the same direction but sashays somewhat as it does. Turn it all off and, were Christian not there to correct it, it would draw a semi-circle in the snow very quickly. It’s good to know that, even in these risk-averse, increasingly electrified times, at Porsche ‘off’ still means ‘off’. 

Then the track starts to wind. Porsche deliberately keeps it as narrow as possible because the engineers don’t want discrepancies caused by drivers taking different lines. The engineers all keep note of who has to call how often for the Cayenne tow truck to dig them out of the drifts. Christian has only binned it once all winter; some of his colleagues are in double figures. 

As speeds rise, so the Taycan becomes ever more balletic as my driver delights in showing me the angles it can not only reach but from which it can also be easily recovered. He says because of the way the motors mete out their power and the fact that the Taycan has the lowest centre of gravity of any Porsche, it is the easiest to drift of the entire bunch. And just to make the point, when we reach an enormous circle cut into the ice, he does a few laps at high speed with the nose pointing directly and unwaveringly at the circle’s centre, chatting away as he does. 

Even so, if the business of getting any kind of impression from a passenger seat is hard, it’s harder still on a frozen and featureless lake where the ice is three feet thick. So after lunch I head out onto the roads with Bernd Propfe, who is project manager for the whole Taycan platform, which, while it will be adapted and adopted by Audi for its E-tron GT (and possibly by Bentley for an electric car of its own), is an entirely Porsche-led project. 

Out here, where nothing is simulated, the Taycan remains unprovoked by its driver. All the systems stay on: it is entirely possible an elk might wander out into the road and they tend not to give way. The surface is compacted snow and ice. It is not a place to mess about. 

And yet we go fast: there’s a Taycan ahead and another behind, and our convoy is somehow proceeding across this pretty hostile terrain at a pace that is not so much impressive as borderline befuddling. We’re on winter tyres, of course, but nothing out of the ordinary and certainly not studded. It’s not just a comfortable way to get about, out here it’s comforting too, because the composure of the car is totally reassuring. If I’d not already done all the work on the lake, I’d have presumed Propfe and his chums had gone mad; in the event, I just sit back, relax and enjoy the show. Ironically, the only drama comes when we reach a bridge offering the sole stretch of dry Tarmac for miles around. He knows it’s coming so slows to a crawl before pinning his foot to the floor. And even though there are well over two tonnes of Taycan to accelerate, it gathers momentum at a rate that suggests the 3.5sec 0-62mph sprint claimed for the Mission E concept that begat the Taycan is now looking very conservative. 

Sadly, however, there is not much more I can tell you, other than it will seat four average-size adults in reasonable comfort, but if there’s a tall one in the back, he or she will likely feel a little short of room. A Panamera is substantially more spacious.