The new Porsche Taycan virtual gearchanges are just as convincing as they are in a Hyundai Ioniq 5 N or a Honda Super N. It’s easy to forget you’re driving an EV sometimes, with the Taycan offering the kind of tactile and aural feedback that some owners might miss from their old Panamera or other combustion-powered sedan. And being optional, you can, of course, still drive it like a conventional electric car. Furthermore, Porsche’s 2027 infotainment and range updates make it a stronger package all round.
This autumn sees the launch of the second gentle refresh of the Porsche Taycan since the model’s introduction in 2019. In true Porsche evolutionary style, you’ll probably not identify it at a glance – well, one variant you will, but we’ll get onto that in a bit – but the updates are meaningful all the same.
View Price on AmazonIn order of least to most exciting, we start with the 2027 model year Taycan’s updated infotainment system. Given the car has a fairly screen-heavy cabin, this is more significant than it might be otherwise, and is likely to have the greatest impact on the way most buyers interact with the car on an everyday basis.
The Taycan still has four screens (a driver display, a main infotainment screen, a passenger display alongside plus an angled screen on the console with heating and ventilation controls), and the changes focus on the centre pair. The Android-based system is now five times more powerful than the old set-up and has 512 gigabytes of storage, up from around 128GB. The extra computational oomph means everything runs quicker than before, and the system is much happier performing the kind of pinch and swipe commands in the sat-nav – changes on the screen are basically instantaneous.
The voice command functions are now AI-powered, which we’re all a bit sick of hearing about these days, but do improve functionality, allowing the car to interpret more complex sentences all in one go (“set the temperature to 68 degrees, turn on my seat cooling, and find me the nearest ice cream parlour” would be a good start given the recent weather). And with Google results showing up in online searches, you’ve got more info at your fingertips, too.
Next, the base Taycan can now go further on a charge, thanks to special low rolling resistance summer tires: the key figure is 269 miles, a modest, but welcome, 7 miles further than it could before. Then there’s E-Shift, Porsche’s take on virtual gearshifts. Available across the range (albeit necessarily combined with Sport Chrono, Bose audio, and Electric Sport Sound, so it’s cheaper on cars which already have those options specified), it gives the Taycan eight virtual gears, and operates similarly to the systems on the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N and Honda Super-N.
Source: autoexpress.co.uk
