26-times from a standing start to 200km/h and back: the new Porsche Taycan has huge stamina

Stuttgart/Lahr. Brand-typical performance that can be reproduced as often as you like: the electric drive of the Porsche Taycan is designed in such a way that it can deliver maximum performance even under repeated, consecutive acceleration. Even several hotlaps of the race track are effortless for the first all-electric sports car from Zuffenhausen.

A pre-production version of the over 440kW (600PS) all-wheel drive vehicle accelerated from 0 to 200km/h 26 times in a row during an initial test. The venue for this sprint challenge was Lahr airfield in South Baden. The test drives were documented on the YouTube channel, “Fully Charged”, and resulted in an average acceleration time of just under ten seconds. The difference between the fastest and slowest trial was just 0.8 seconds.

The test runs took place in both directions on the airfield's taxiway. The entire approximately 2.3-kilometer track was used. The outside temperature was 28 degrees Celsius.

The new Taycan: the first all-electric sports car from Porsche

A whole raft of technical innovations allows the Taycan to achieve breathtaking acceleration values, sports car-typical pulling power and superior, permanently available performance:

• The two powerful electric motors on the front and rear axles are so-called permanently excited synchronous machines (PSMs). These have a rotor with high-quality permanent magnets that generate a natural magnetic field. The rotor moves synchronously with the stator's rotating magnetic field, hence the name PSM. The pulse inverter (PI) specifies the frequency of the rotating field in the stator, thus determining the rotor speed. Thanks to their design and operation, as well as their excellent thermal behavior, permanently excited synchronous machines are capable of delivering and repeatedly reproducing the high performance typical of Porsche.

• One special feature of the electric motors in the Taycan is the so-called hairpin winding. This means that the stator's coils are made of wires that are not round, but rectangular. The wires are bent and their shape, before being inserted into the stator’s laminated core, is reminiscent of hairpins – hence the name. The open ends are welded together by laser beam. Hairpin technology means that the wires can be more tightly packed, thereby increasing the amount of copper in the stator. Producing greater output and torque with the same volume. Another key benefit for a performance-oriented car such as the Taycan is that a hairpin stator can be cooled much more efficiently.

• The Taycan is the first standard-production vehicle to use an 800-volt system architecture instead of the standard 400 volts customary for electric cars. This allows a high continuous output and charge power, and reduces the weight of the high-voltage wiring, among other things. So, the car can be driven and also charged at speed.

• Thermal management, combined with the drivetrain concept (PSM and 800-volt technology), ensures high reproducibility. On-demand cooling achieves characteristic sports car performance - multiple times over, if required. Porsche has therefore enabled a wide performance and range spectrum. In winter, intelligent thermal management also facilitates efficient, on-demand heating.

The Taycan has a top speed of over 250km/h. It accelerates from 0 to 100km/h in well under 3.5 seconds. The lithium-ion battery has a gross capacity of around 90kWh. The Taycan will make its debut in September and be launched at the end of the year.

The proving ground: Lahr airfield

Opened in 1913 as a zeppelin airfield, Lahr was used as a military air base after the Second World War, first by French troops and then by Canadian NATO troops from 1967. Since the latter withdrew in 1994, ADAC Südbaden has held motorsport events on the site. From 1996 to 1998, Formula 1 and Touring Car races were held on the so-called Regio-Ring, some attracting over 30,000 spectators. Located just off the A5 motorway (Karlsruhe/Basel), the airfield is now used for corporate and freight flights, as well as for test and measurement drives by the automotive industry.

Image material in the Porsche Newsroom (newsroom.porsche.de) and Porsche Press Database (presse.porsche.de).