Pikes Peak. A proving ground that commonly hosts some of the fastest accelerating and best handling cars in the world. Many car manufacturers build cars specifically for the purpose of going fast up this steep mountain road, like Bentley and their biofuel-powered, 750 horsepower Continental GT.
However, this is about a different luxury brand: Porsche. Their electric car in question, the Taycan 4S, is a monster, with 562 horsepower delivered immediately to the road through a four wheel drive system that can consistently run to 60 mph in 3.4 seconds, which is uncommon in electric cars.
The record Car and Driver set was not about acceleration, quite the opposite actually. Here’s the situation: the drivers in the $136,190 Taycan 4S have 12 miles of electric range left in their battery, but the nearest charging station was at the entrance gate 17 miles away. However, the Taycan has a regenerative braking system that can turn braking force into charge for the battery- and there’s a LOT of braking that can be done while driving down the mountain.
Long story short, the drivers reached the bottom of the mountain with more enough charge to go 48 miles, alieving their “range anxiety”. Here’s where they set the record. The park ranger who stands guard at the gate performed a mandatory brake temperature check on their rotors to make sure they were safe to drive and, since they had been using regenerative braking that doesn’t involve friction between the rotors and the pads, their brakes were a cool 67 degrees, an unofficial record on Pikes Peak.
To put this into perspective, the park ranger said, “I’ve seen front-rotor temps exceed 900 degrees,” showing the power of the Taycan’s regen braking system. Moral of the story: if you’ve got a mountain and an electric car, skip the charging station.
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