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How The New Porsche Taycan Became An Efficiency Monster With Crazy, Tiny Tweaks

Engineers explain how they managed to get big increases in range for the new Taycan.

Porsche Taycan Efficiency

Chris Perkins

By: Chris Perkins

Apr 17, 2024 at 11:00am ET

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One can’t help but wonder if Porsche was stung by the criticism of the low range and efficiency figures of the original Taycan. Never mind the fact that the car often beat EPA estimates in real-world testing; having to print that your car can’t do 300 miles on a charge while a Tesla Model S and Lucid Air were advertised as going far further must not have been fun. Or maybe this is just the way things are at Weissach, Porsche’s R&D center. Find improvements wherever possible.

Probably, it’s a bit of both. While EPA figures for the facelifted Taycan aren’t out yet, by all other indications, it seems that Porsche has built a more efficient EV. I spoke to a handful of engineers at the car’s Spain launch to learn how.

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The battery pack sees the most significant changes. Porsche switched to a Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC) 811 chemistry—which means eight parts nickel to one part manganese to one part cobalt—from NMC 712 chemistry. What that means, if you’re not a chemistry expert, is more energy density.

Porsche Taycan Cutaway

The new electric Macan also uses NMC 811 cells, but Klaus Wipfler, one of the high-voltage battery engineers for the Taycan, explains to InsideEVs that the exact chemistries are slightly different.

Previously, the Taycan’s standard battery pack had 71 kWh usable capacity (79.2 kWh total) and the Performance Battery Plus offered 83.7 kWh usable (93.4 kWh total); now, those figures are up to 82.3 kWh usable (89 kWh total) and 97 kWh usable (105 kWh), respectively. As a Porsche spokesperson put it, the base battery is about equivalent to the old upgrade pack, while the Performance Battery Plus takes another step forward.

Porsche Taycan Cutaway

In a presentation before we drove the new Taycan models, Sarah Razvani, project lead for the Taycan battery, says that this new chemistry alone accounts for a 14 percent increase in range for the Turbo S model. (This comes standard with the larger pack, as do all but the base and 4S sedans.) The new chemistry increases weight, however, so Porsche took measures to reduce the weight of the pack.

Wifpler says that the copper bus bars were tweaked, the number of fuses reduced, and the steel undertray for the pack was replaced with a composite unit. All in all, the weight for the Performance Battery Plus goes down from 1397.7 pounds to 1377.9 pounds, while total energy capacity goes up by 12 percent.

2025 Porsche Taycan Turbo S Sport Turismo First Drive

Porsche also tweaked the car’s thermal management system, which had the effect of increasing the ideal operating temperature window for the battery. This also helps with fast charging. Essentially, you can start DC fast charging from as low as 59 degrees Fahrenheit, down from 95 degrees in the old version.

There’s a new heat pump and an 800-volt HVAC compressor (up from 400 volts) which together increase battery heating and cooling rates. New wheel designs and tires also helped contribute to a range increase, with new “summer range” tires available for 20-inch wheels. All Taycan models get a new rear motor and inverter, too, which are more efficient than the old units.

Porsche Taycan Cutaway

You can even see the battery temperature and the maximum charging rate possible in the gauge cluster. The latter is calculated based on temperature, state-of-charge and a number of other factors. Now also standard is a charging planner, which routes you to an appropriate charging station along the trip and automatically preheats the battery. The old Taycan was excellent at 270 kW, but the new one can take up to 320 kW. In our testing, a Taycan 4S with the larger battery managed 8 to 80 percent charge in just 16 minutes.

2025 Porsche Taycan Range Test

The new Taycan can also harvest up to 400 kW under regenerative braking, up from 320 kW in the previous car. Before up to 0.3 g was covered by regen alone, but now that figure jumps up to nearly 0.5 g. That has an effect on range too, but the car is constantly tweaking the balance between regenerative and friction braking.

2025 Porsche Taycan Turbo GT

“The whole recuperation strategy is always to keep the car stable,” says Christian Wolfsried, chassis engineering lead for the Taycan. The new rear motor in theory allows for even more regen, but too much braking at the rear can unstabilize the car. Of course, you’ll only see brief spikes of 400-kW regenerative braking when slowing down hard from high speeds. So the overall benefit to efficiency is not just the peak value attainable, but in the more subtle ways regeneration is managed.

There are lots of other little tweaks, too many to mention. But Wolfsried shares one that I think sums up Porsche’s approach to the facelifted Taycan. “We improved the braking resistance when you're not braking,” he says. “Imagine when you release the brake, the pads sometimes stick to the disc. We have a stronger spring now pushing the pads away.” This must only bring a tiny gain in efficiency, but it also shows the depth of engineering here. Wherever efficiencies can be found, they’re found.

Gallery: Porsche Taycan Cutaways

Porsche Taycan Cutaway

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And you can bet future Porsche EVs will be even more efficient. Wifpler says there are always ways to optimize cooling, come up with better regenerative braking strategies, and improve fast charging. He even says Porsche is working on a way of using computer simulation to trial battery chemistries—the actual makeup of a battery cell is one of the only things in the automotive world that can’t be simulated accurately.

In all, Porsche promises around 35 percent more range in both the base Taycan and the Taycan Turbo S, at the other end of the spectrum. Based on our testing, we’re confident in calling the new Taycan a 300-mile car. Getting there, clearly, took a lot of work.

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