Every summer, students graduating from the prestigious Masters of Vehicle Design course at the Royal College of Art put on a show. Most of the scale models on display are spectacular, as you would expect, given that they were envisioned in the minds of the chief designers one day for the world’s biggest automakers.
However, the ideas are often just as unrealistic: deliberate flights of whimsy belonging far into the future. Cars look wild and claim to do everything you can imagine, but they could never exist.
You can see where we’re headed here: Porsche’s new Taycan Cross Turismo looks a lot like one of those year-end concepts at RCA. Only, it’s on sale in 2021, rather than 2121, and in its most basic form 4 costs little more than BMW’s new M3 Competition, at just under £ 80,000.
For that price, you get 469 horsepower in a stylishly low (if reptilian) shooting brake body that has a Ferrari-grade ‘wow’ factor, but is also fitted with roof rails and rear brackets for a bicycle rack. All of this is out of the ordinary. Still, that’s not all, as the comparatively reasonable 4 isn’t the car we have here.
Our first glimpse of the Cross Turismo in non-prototype form instead comes in the form of the scorching £ 140,000 Turbo S, which sits right at the top of Porsche’s now eight-member lineup of Taycan derivatives and looks right away. an even more extraordinary device.
The Turbo S in particular is an automotive platypus: impossible to categorize. Over 750 horsepower and an extremely low center of gravity is pure supercar, but three-chamber air suspension, space for four (or five, with the optional rear seat setup), and an opulent cabin suggest a GT wagon. plush.
There are five ride height settings, rugged wheel arch liners, and a Gravel mode, all of which suggest a certain level of rough-road capability, and, with improved headroom, are where the Cross is. Turismo demarcates the regular Taycan sedan.
The long shooting brake silhouette then allows a generous 1,171 liters of trunk space when the rear seats are folded flat; and even with the backrests raised you still get over 80% of the capacity you do in the BMW 3 Series Touring. True utility, in other words, although the opening itself is high lip and slightly narrow, due to the Cross Turismo’s phenomenally wide hips, which cover 305/30 section Pirellis and 21 inch wheels. openwork optional.
Finally, there’s the fact that this thing is electric. And this is the most surprising element of the whole, because before 2019 no road car had left Zuffenhausen without pistons. So what exactly is the Cross Turismo Turbo S? Beyond an engineered flex of truly Schwarzeneggerian proportions, I’m still not sure.
What it is not is light. Its curb weight of 2320 kg exceeds that of the Panamera Turbo S Sport Turismo with the longer, taller V8 engine and dual turbocharging of 185 kg. This is the result of the 93.4 kWh battery, which can travel 260 miles or 308 miles in the city. Regarding charging, the 800V electrical system (400V is more typical in the industry) means that the pack can theoretically replenish itself from 5% to 80% of its capacity in 20 minutes.
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Source: www.autocar.co.uk
This notice was published: 2021-04-27 22:01:23
