Remember Dieselgate? How can we forget. Volkswagen and its subsidiaries sold emissions-cheating diesel passenger cars by the truckload, only stopping after being caught red-handed by an independent testing lab. We, or at least I, felt pretty dumb, because I had promoted those diesel products—they drove well! Very quickly, Volkswagen pivoted away from diesel and towards electrification. Audi’s E-Tron crossover, Porsche’s E-Hybrid variants of the Panamera and Cayenne, and now the all-electric Taycan super-sedan have brought mainstream German build quality to Tesla’s meme-based EV culture. The Taycan Turbo S was the best car I drove last year, the kind of EV you’d expect from a company that races at LeMans.

And while no VW Group brand should get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the claimed efficiency of their vehicles—at least not this decade—I believe the Taycan Turbo’s EPA-estimated range vastly understates what it can do in the real world.

Most people don’t know this, but the EPA doesn’t physically test every new car. Instead, manufacturers are given a set of testing parameters that account for a wide variety of conditions, and they use those parameters in their own testing. They then submit the results of those tests to the EPA, which reviews the data and publishes the official efficiency and range numbers.

Occasionally, the EPA does physically test a car, to confirm an automaker's numbers. The agency did confirmation testing on a Taycan Turbo (non-S) and came up with 201 miles of range, a slight improvement over the official 192-mile rating for the Turbo S. Tesla says the newest Model S P100D will go 326 miles. (The EPA has performed confirmation testing on past variants of the Model S, but has not tested any of the currently-available versions of that car.) That 134-mile difference in range between the Taycan Turbo S and the Model S P100D is no joke, if that’s the real difference. Two months ago, Car and Driver drove both cars simultaneously on an oval at 75 mph for 100 miles, and here's what they found:

More surprisingly, the Porsche held its own in our 75-mph range test. While the EPA says there's a 134-mile difference in the range between the two, extrapolating from our 100-mile run, the real-world difference amounts to 10 miles in the Tesla's favor. The Taycan also won the other speed test, with its consistently higher charging rate providing quicker recharging. Tesla's Supercharger network might have more stations, but it also has more users, and Tesla owners have faced long queues just to plug in during peak travel times. At the Electrify America outpost where we charged the Porsche, 15 other plugs went unused the entire time we were there.

The difference in range from C/D's test was just 10 miles, with the Porsche outperforming its EPA estimate by 17 miles, and the Model S falling 104 miles short of its claimed range.



We've noticed similar discrepancies when manufacturers offer naturally aspirated and turbocharged versions of the same vehicles. Turbocharged engines get better fuel mileage than naturally aspirated engines in EPA testing. But the differences can be nominal in the real world. And in performance driving, horsepower takes energy, no matter how you get it. In high-performance situations, sometimes the EPA-friendly small-displacement turbo motor will actually burn more fuel than the naturally aspirated, bigger-bore engine.

The point is, no matter if you’re talking about a Tesla or a Taycan, the EPA range isn't absolute—and, as the EPA itself notes, mileage will vary. The real-world range is what matters. To me, that means setting forth on a highway with the cruise control at a mellow but reasonable speed, putting on tunes, and driving long past boredom.

Matt Farah

It’s very rare a car makes an impression on me like the Taycan Turbo S did, and frankly, I still think you should need a special license to buy something like that. The performance is absolutely shocking. The same Car and Driver article referenced above also mentioned that the Taycan Turbo S is the quickest-accelerating car that magazine has ever tested. And yes, if you drive it like your own portable mag-launch roller coaster, you will find yourself with a sub-optimal range. I also once drained the tank in a Cadillac CTS-V in 64 miles on a racetrack, which is what happens when you turn stored energy into speed. Conversely, during my time with the Taycan Turbo S, I discovered that if you drive like a normal human being, you will experience Porsche’s claimed range for that vehicle of 250-280 miles. Other journalists subsequently reported the same thing. It requires superhuman levels of restraint to have a rocket sled like that and not make it do the rocket sled thing–that’s where your money is going, after all. But it’s possible; easy, even.

Which brings me to the 2021 Taycan 4S, the first of the "normal" Taycans; the volume model. Eventually, Taycan 4S will be offered with two battery options, a smaller 79-kWh battery and the larger Performance Battery Plus, a 93-kWh unit shared with the Turbo and Turbo S. For now, only the large battery is available. Trust me, you want the big one. It’s $6700 and you get not only more range, but more power. Specifically, an extra 53 horsepower and 40 lb-ft, which is money well spent. Most of the time, the dual-motor setup is good for 482 horsepower and 479 lb-ft, but for 2.5-second bursts, you get an overboost good for 562! Zero to 60 is a claimed 3.8 seconds, and Porsche claims 12.2 in the quarter-mile. My bum, a finely tuned scientific instrument, calls shenanigans. If I had to guess, Porsche's estimate is an easy three-tenths conservative on both counts. The 4S boogies.

Put it this way: if I never drove the Turbo S, and you told me the 4S was the Turbo S, I still would have been impressed. But the difference between those two cars isn't limited to software. The Turbo and Turbo S have the same front motor as the 4S, with a larger inverter, plus a larger rear motors than 4S, albeit with the same inverter. Got that? Both share the two-speed rear axle transmission, suspension hardware, and pretty much everything else aside from wheels, tires, and brakes. A side effect of the 4S having a smaller rear motor is that the extra room above the axle goes towards trunk space —a welcome improvement.

The 4S offers a big spread between the basic, small-battery, limited-option cars and the big-battery, performance option cars. You can get rear-axle steering, which, in addition to all the great things it does for stability, reduces the Taycan’s turning circle by nearly 3 feet, which is great in the city. You can also get big wheels, stickier tires, and better brakes, but the standard 19-inch Aero wheels and six-piston steel brakes are more than up to the task. My tester, which I’m told is the first U.S.-spec Taycan 4S in America, had the standard wheels, big battery, rear steer, and not much else.

My task was simple: see just how far it would go on a charge, driving like a regular person. No fancy hypermiling, no tricks, just point the nose east, drive a real long way, and then drive back, getting a real-world figure that’s easily repeatable by you folks reading this at home. The EPA just released its range estimate for the Taycan 4S: 203 miles. I figured I could beat that, particularly in excellent California conditions.

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My stunt-driver friend Sera lives in Palm Springs, and though social distancing dictates that I shouldn’t go there and hang out with her, her house is exactly 125 miles from the fast-charger in my neighborhood, so that was as good a destination as any. I could wave through the window. Reduced traffic meant I could have relatively predictable driving conditions, for L.A. anyway.

To get the Taycan up to full charge, I visited a new Electrify America station in Mar Vista, a convenient few miles from my home in Venice, California. It was located behind a bank, clean and well-lit. Though the first charger cable produced an error message, the second plug worked, and I blasted the Taycan with 150kW for 51 minutes to go from 30 to 100 percent charge, at a cost of $52. The dashboard indicated 257 miles of range. If the car was to be believed, I would drive straight to Sera’s house, turn around and drive the same route back, 250 miles, and have 7 miles to spare—nearly 25 percent better than the EPA estimate.

Charging up at the start of the journey. Matt Farah

I jumped on the freeway less than a mile away, set the cruise to 70, and, aside from one dead-stop traffic jam somewhere east of Riverside that added about eight minutes of idle time and a quarter-mile of creeping, had a positively uneventful drive to Palm Springs. When I arrived at Sera’s house, 125 miles away, the Taycan displayed 167 miles to empty! While a radar cruise system, optional but not equipped here, would have made the drive perfect and required slightly less brainpower, even without it, this was not hard. I had the A/C set to 70 degrees, with the cooled seat turned on; the car was in Range mode, which disconnects the rear drive motor for efficiency; and I had a Valentine One plugged into the 12v. And I mindlessly beat the car’s own estimated range by 60 miles on the first half of the mission, for an estimated real-world range of 292 miles at this point.

I waved hello to Sera, she put an espresso outside for me, and we turned back west. As every single person does after I depart in a Taycan, Sera texted me, "OMG THE SOUNDSSSSSS! THE FUTURE!" You know how in a future-set movie, the cool futuristic EVs make those sci-fi noises? The Taycan does that, both inside the car and out. When you roll up, it sounds like you’ve driven into a movie from the future. Hans Zimmer would kill for this level of sound design. And it doesn’t come off as gimmicky, either; it’s perfectly appropriate for the occasion.

Matt Farah

Half an hour west of Palm Springs, some quick head math revealed that simply driving back to the Mar Vista station wouldn’t pose any kind of challenge at all. In fact, thanks to a blustery headwind on the way east, which had now become a tailwind, the miles I had traveled plus the remaining range added up to 312 miles total.

So I added some miles. I turned south down the 57 freeway towards Garden Grove, which had more elevation than I remembered, then headed west towards Long Beach, adding roughly 25 miles to the route. When I got to Long Beach, it was roughly 36 miles back to the charging station, but I had over 60 indicated miles remaining, so I added some more. I passed the Washington Blvd. exit and continued north, all the way to the Getty Center, the renowned art museum in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains. I then turned around, went back south, and completely uneventfully returned to the Electrify America station at which I'd started 4 hours and 55 minutes prior.

I had personally driven the Taycan 4S 275.6 miles in a morning, and the car had an indicated 18 miles of range remaining, for a total of 294 miles. There’s your zero-brainpower, flow of traffic, mixed elevation highway range on a sunny, mid-60’s SoCal day.

Matt Farah

I did not try at all to maximize the vehicle’s range, aside from the very basic techniques of putting the car into Range mode and setting the cruise control at a reasonable but bearable speed. I also drove over a large mountain in both directions. Assuming a flat drive, a more efficient speed, zero traffic, or the controlled conditions of the oval track that Car and Driver used, I bet the Taycan 4S could easily surpass the range I got on the highway.

The EPA's testing is complicated, accounting for a wide range of scenarios and use cases. It seems Tesla optimizes its cars for the EPA test, which gives them range numbers to brag about on paper—numbers that owners I’ve spoken with can't seem to reach. Multiple EV Cannonball record holder Alex Roy says he "might get 230 miles out of it on the highway," against an EPA rating of 311 miles for his personal Extended Range Model 3. He wrote this in a piece for The Drive, in which he beat the EPA range in the Taycan Turbo by 100 miles. And again, the EPA rating for the lesser Taycan 4S is 203 miles. A number I beat by 81 miles.

So the point is this: the rated range only tells a small part of the story. We hate to ask you, the potential car customer, to do homework. But listen to owners, go on forums, and read real-world tests to see what these cars can actually do in conditions similar to where you live and how you drive. You might be surprised.

An earlier version of this story included incorrect pricing for the Taycan's large battery. That has been updated.

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