Simply Abu Dhabi XXXVI

2 3 1 S I M P LY A B U DH A B I “Nettes auto.” Roughly translated, “cool car,” said the small child who was barely old enough to ride a bicycle, as we stopped in a small village between Berlin and Dresden. Her family came to inspect the dramatic lines of the new electric Porsche Taycan after we silently stopped outside their house to switch drivers and stretch the legs en route to our overnight stay, 300km down the road in Hof. Moments earlier I’d been hustling the 751bhp, 1,050Nm Turbo S version through the back roads and lamenting the lack of sound and fury you normally get from a Porsche whether it be the flat-six turbocharged engine from the 911 or the twin-turbo V8 in the Cayenne and Panamera, but I’m not this car’s target market. That little girl is. By the time she’s old enough to drive, EVs will be the norm and the Taycan may now be her new poster car, so if she thought it was ‘nette,’ who am I to argue? Porsche was out to prove a point about the usability of EVs, so this drive wasn’t going to be just a few laps of a race track and a half day thrash on nearby roads. No, we were in for the full German road trip covering more than 700 kilometres through cities, villages and as fast as we dared on motorways. To make it authentic, it rained most of the way, forcing us to frequently use battery-sapping devices like window demisters, wipers and lights. Despite this, our Taycan required just three charges in total. A 25-minute fast charge at both lunch stops from nine and five per cent respectively to 80 per cent which was finished before we had munched down a burger and coffee, along with an overnight charge from 14 per cent at the hotel. The Taycan is the first production vehicle with a system voltage of 800 volts as opposed to 350 and 375 offered by Tesla which is expected to dramatically reduce recharging times. PorscheTaycan FirstDrive B y D a m i e n R e i d