Changing the landscape

What do I remember most vividly? Strangely enough, not acceleration, which at times felt like a physical assault. I’d seen the power, torque and weight figures, crunched the numbers and therefore had some idea of what was coming, or as much as you can before actually experiencing such crushing performance.

It was the steering that I remember, because it wasn’t what I had expected. At all. Here was steering with heft, with precision, with off-centre linearity. It was how I’d expect a 911 to steer, not a four-door electric saloon.

It provided a window into a world where electric cars can be sporting, can reward the enthusiast driver, can be a car you’d drive because you can, not because you are required to. We’d never seen anything like it in that space before. The Taycan in general, and the blisteringly fast Turbo and Turbo S models, were landmark Porsche models, perhaps even more so than the original 930 whose sobriquet they share.

And, yes, eyebrows were always going to be raised at the ongoing use of the ‘Turbo’ badge, but I never had a problem with it. Half a century ago, it was used to denote the fastest, most powerful car in the range, and it still is. Of course, by the time the Taycan came around, its use was no longer literal, but in these days, when the vast majority of ICE cars are turbocharged, the fitment of one can hardly be seen as a defining characteristic any more. In the context of Porsche, everyone knows what ‘Turbo’ means – no further explanation was, or is, required.