Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in Volume 7 of B.H. Magazine, order your copy now.
Is there such a thing as too much power? The question – one I once thought entirely ludicrous – jolts to mind as I fire the Porsche Taycan out of a sweeping corner on the Bells Line of Road, the quieter, tighter alternative to the main drag, which snakes across the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.
There’s a faint morning chill in the air, and occasional damp patches, the sort that usually encourages restraint. The electric hero of the Porsche line-up has other ideas.
I lean into the throttle, and the response is instant, savage, almost absurd. There’s no build-up, no warning, no sense of machinery gathering itself together. Just a head-snapping surge that feels less like acceleration and more like a rewiring of reality. It’s more of an amusement park ride than something you’d expect from a European powerhouse of fast machinery.
This isn’t just any Taycan. Since arriving in Australia in 2020, Porsche’s electric four-door has built a reputation for clinical speed and improbably adept dynamics. Porsche engineering, translated for the battery age.
The Turbo GT – the pinnacle of the range – is what happens when that brief is taken personally. The numbers are ridiculous, bordering on laughable.
Standard output sits at 580kW, more than the soon-to-arrive Turbo S (523kW), which sits at the top of the 911 line-up. Engage launch control in the Taycan, and that swells to 760kW. Pull the right-hand steering-wheel paddle – the Turbo GT is the only Taycan with paddles – and ‘attack’ mode unlocks a brief overboost worth another 55kW. Tally it up, and there’s up to 815kW at your disposal. In the old money, that’s 1108 horsepower.
They’re lofty numbers, and shade anything produced from petrol alone. Even a modern F1 car tops out at around 1,000 horsepower, giving the Turbo GT some serious bragging rights. For a car that’s priced from $416,000 plus on-road costs, it’s something of a performance bargain.
What the figures don’t convey is how little ceremony accompanies all that power – or, more correctly, the torque. There’s no gearshift, no flare of revs, no sense of anticipation. You think about accelerating, and the Taycan does it – violently. From a standstill, it’s peerless.
At anything resembling normal road speeds, planting the throttle feels like an act of provocation. The two electric motors dump their combined 1,240Nm (more than double a respectable V8) onto all four wheels, the Pirelli P Zeros momentarily arguing with the bitumen. The traction control light flickers and physics recalibrate.
Pull Attack Mode, and a ten-second countdown doesn’t feel like a warning, more of a dare. Unleash it, and the car feels like it’s been kicked by something large and prehistoric. Use it poorly, and you’ll arrive at the next corner with your brain still catching up to your eyes. It became prudent to warn the photographer riding shotgun when things were about to get spicy.
The bloke in the growling HSV with the Bathurst-inspired wings? He’s a distant dot in the rearview mirror within seconds. The gleaming Ferrari dripping in old-school theatre and cachet? It simply can’t deploy its power with anything like the same ferocity.
This is the Taycan’s defining advantage: domination without effort.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have driven plenty of fast cars, from Italy, Germany, the UK and America’s finest muscle (which, like some of their politicians, can lack finesse but deliver on impact). The Turbo GT sets a new benchmark, at least when it comes to launching quickly. Of course, this level of craziness doesn’t come without compromise – especially if you opt for the no-cost Weissach Pack.
This otherwise practical four-door loses its rear seats entirely, replaced by a sheet of exposed carbon fibre that looks fantastic and creates a talking point, but does little for everyday practicality. Boot space also takes a hit thanks to the fitment of a 900-amp inverter – a 50 per cent upgrade over the Taycan Turbo S – necessary to feed the motors their insatiable appetite for electricity.
Up front, electrically adjustable seats give way to fixed-back buckets set low in the already low-slung car. The steering wheel is adjusted manually. The passenger display screen is gone. Rear air vents have been replaced with a blanked-out panel.
And whereas all other Taycans allow you to charge from either side of the car, for the Turbo GT the door on the driver’s side has been omitted. Charging itself becomes a little less theatrical, too. There’s no motorised charge flap here. With the Weissach Pack, you press the panel to open it by hand. Oh, the sacrifices…
But this isn’t penny-pinching. The Weissach Pack exists to make a point: this Taycan isn’t pretending to be sensible. It’s a car engineered for a specific purpose, right down to its more aggressive aerodynamics (including a wing that makes for a great picnic table!).
Yet there are sensibilities and an everyday liveability. In ‘normal’ mode, the supple air suspension smothers bumps to a point that the Turbo GT is somehow sensible, and genuinely comfortable. As with other Taycans, the Turbo GT can be left to its own electric devices, or you can dial up Porsche’s synthetic whirr. It sounds vaguely like the Starship Enterprise spooling up. I leave it off.
In the Turbo GT, you’re aware you’re closer to nature, too. In the pursuit of weight savings, a chunk of sound-deadening has been omitted. With no rear seats to mask it, rocks ping through the wheel arches, and the Pirellis generate a constant, rising roar as speed climbs – which it does with alarming ease.
On the wrong road surface, of which Australia has plenty, it can create quite the racket. Still, there’s serious capability at play.
The Taycan is already a portly beast, and in Weissach guise there’s still a ute-like 2,220kg working to challenge the status quo. That said, my shimmering Purple Sky Metallic beast does a brilliant job of hiding those kilos.
The GT hunkers down in corners, broad 21-inch, 305mm-wide rear and 265mm front tyres biting into the tarmac with conviction. Beautifully weighted steering and a mid-corner composure no SUV gets close to cements the electric hero as a true driver’s car – minus the sound.
Braking performance is equally serious. There’s a lot of mass building pace very quickly, but 10-piston front calipers clamping cross-drilled carbon-ceramic discs wash off speed with startling authority. The deceleration is almost as obnoxious as the acceleration.
But it’s the brutally effective straight-line party trick I keep coming back to. So much so that I diverted to Sydney Dragway to put some real numbers around the on-paper claims. Confession time: I was forced to return another day with tyre warmers to get enough heat into the Pirellis to help it launch without the traction control working feverishly to control wheelspin.
With everything primed, it delivered on the numbers – and more. The trip down the quarter-mile strip took just 9.083 seconds, a new Aussie record for a bog-stock production car. And at the end of that 400 metres it was travelling at 252km/h.
A deeper dive into the stats from the run showed it took just six seconds to hit 200km/h, making mere supercars look like a warm-up act. All of which was enough to get the car banned from the drags; without a parachute, it was deemed too quick.
The Taycan Turbo GT is devastatingly effective, but it doesn’t always seduce. It doesn’t flirt. It simply arrives, obliterates the benchmark, and moves on. For some, that will be the ultimate flex. For others, it could feel like winning without sweating. Whether it’s lovable depends on your perspective.
