2022 Porsche Taycan Charges Faster on Road Trips


September 15, 2021
Spotlight
Editorial


Electric cars are no longer the mere examples of transportation in the future. They are now available in the present and are surprisingly accepted worldwide with open hands unlike what we expected when the transition from combustion vehicles to electric cars first started. The key challenges that electric car manufacturers faced were definitely the range, the charging time, and infrastructure that these silent cars would need.

And surprisingly so, in just a few years, some of the popular manufacturers have found ways to make their products more reliable, manageable and efficient when it comes to power management and the Stuttgart based giant has proved its engineering prowess through the Porsche Taycan in a very impressive way.

To start with, the Taycan has always been a huge success in the market specifically due to the fact that if you buy a Taycan for yourself, not only do you get an efficient and green car, you also get the best of Porsche, which ultimately translates to best in class build quality, refinement, driving dynamics and looks. Taycan’s success was so impressive that it laid a remarkable base for the upcoming Porsche electric cars with the Taycan Cross Turismo already available in the market and the Macan EV making its debut in a few months to come.

For the 2022 Taycan and Taycan Cross Turismo, Porsche has made some notable changes and additions to these cars in the form of some technical as well as aesthetic updates. For starters, the Taycan gets a plethora of paint options available through the Exclusive Manufaktur program as well as some updates to its infotainment system with Android Auto now available as a standard option. But a really notable change lies in its power management system. The 2022 Taycan gets significant updates to its thermal management and charging functions with the addition of a Turbo Charging Planner.

The Turbo Charging Planner is a significant part of how the Taycan manages to get better range and charging time when you are on a road trip. The formula is simple yet complex. What the Taycan does with the help of this system, is to precondition the battery pack for charging. This simply means that the system gets the Taycan’s battery pack to an optimum temperature right before you plug in your Taycan for fast charging and this helps save a few minutes on fast charging.

Now comes the question as to how road trips can help save you some time in charging the Taycan as well as get more range out of it. The answer is a really clever solution from Porsche. Just like any other premium electric car in the market, the Porsche Taycan monitors its remaining charge and range and finds the nearest supercharging stations near you while you are traveling.

With the help of the new updates in the form of the Turbo Charging Planner, the Taycan knows that it needs to be recharged and while it finds the nearest supercharging station and lets you know, it also preconditions its battery pack for supercharging thus increasing its charging speed and efficiency and reducing the time that you would spend at the charging station by a few minutes.

Every model of the Porsche Taycan comes with an 800-volt architecture that allows a charging capacity of up to 270 kilowatts. But apart from Electrify America’s 350 kW DC charging stations and a few other stations that provide the capacity to charge your Taycan at 270 kW, there aren’t many charging stations that can provide quick charging times.

Sure, with a 270 kW charging capacity power station, a Taycan with an 83.7 kWh battery can go from 5 percent charge to 80 percent in just 23 minutes. But in most of the common charging stations where you would find 400-volt DC fast chargers providing 50 kW charging capacity, the charging time increases to 93 minutes for the same 5 percent to 80 percent increase in charge.

The Turbo Charging Planner seems to sort this issue and provides you with considerably faster charge times to ensure that you can continue your road trips without any boredom at the charging stations or range anxiety. When it comes to range, Porsche has also managed to increase their range by a few miles all thanks to its efficient waste heat management system and the clever free coasting drivability that it comes with.

In order to get the most out of the powertrain and increase its longevity and efficiency, the Taycan cuts off the power from the front motors when they are not working to their full potential. This helps reduce friction losses and helps the Taycan drive as a rear-wheel-drive at constant speeds which is exactly what you need on the highway when you are on a road trip. The powertrain unit provides power right when you need it through its front wheels within milliseconds which explains how complicated yet efficient these powertrain systems are.

Sure, the Porsche Taycan might not offer the kind of range that some of its rivals like the Tesla Model S Plaid or Lucid Air Dream Edition R will have on offer, but Porsche has surely done their best to get the most out of the already existing battery packs and powertrain management systems that they have onboard the Taycan and we can all be sure that in the coming years, Porsche will engineer even better electric cars than the Taycan with more range and lesser charging time.

Featured Photo Mitch Kemp from Unsplash.