TURBO CHARGE

IF ANY BRAND CAN MAKE AN ELECTRIC FUTURE EXCITING, IT’S PORSCHE. BUT IS ITS BRAVE NEW WORLD BETTER THAN THE PRESENT ICON?

- SCOTT NEWMAN

IT’S EASY TO SEE how this could be confusing. Here we have two Porsche Turbos and while there are indeed two individual turbochargers present, they’re both installed in the one car, compressing the air before its fed into the 911 Turbo’s 3.8-litre flat-six. The Porsche Taycan Turbo S doesn’t have any turbos because it doesn’t have an engine. The only air it compresses is via the bellows in its adaptive air suspension.

Porsche’s decision to apply the naming convention of its internal combustion engine (ICE) models to its battery electric vehicles (BEV) led to plenty of gnashed teeth in certain sectors, but it is a very logical decision. Partially because any customers switching from a 911/Panamera/ Cayenne/Macan will instantly be able to make sense of the model lineup, and partially because ‘Porsche Taycan Performance Battery Plus with more powerful pulse controlled inverter’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

You might be curious as to why we have one Turbo (the 911) and one Turbo S (the Taycan). It’s simply a case of using the most closely aligned models in the respective ranges, separated by around $60,000 but, more importantly, just 16kW/tonne. This isn’t intended to be a straight comparison, though. Comparing a 911 with a Taycan would be like comparing a Mercedes-AMG GT R with a GT63, but whereas the Mercs at least use the same engine, the Porsches could scarcely be more different in their propulsion systems.