Matt Prior: two hours for 2,000 miles is the most impressive Car News

If you were to cross the United States in an electric car, how long do you think you would spend charging it?

Incidentally, that’s 2384.5 miles, and the car is a base rear-drive Porsche Taycan with the optional 84kWh large battery, which achieves a maximum range of 301 miles on the European WLTP test. and 225 miles on the more pessimistic/realistic US EPA one.

So how long would you spend plugged in? You’d start in Los Angeles with a full battery and end up in New York with an empty battery, of course, so you’d get your first 300 miles (or so) for nothing and gasp at the finish line. And you could stop, what, 10 times, for an hour each time, if you drove carefully and only used nice big juicy chargers.

That’s not good enough for Guinness World Record holder Wayne Gerdes, who is an expert in electric vehicle endurance testing. In six days at the end of 2021, he set a new record by driving a Taycan from coast to coast while spending just two hours, 26 minutes and 48 seconds charging it.

That beat the previous record (a respectable seven hours, 10 minutes and one second, achieved in a Kia EV6) by almost five hours.

Gerdes is an expert on hypermiling and talks about it on his enthusiastic website, cleanmpg.com. Hypermiling, if you don’t know, is all about extracting as much economy as possible from a vehicle. The more Gerdes could maximize the Taycan’s range, the less charge he would need.

But that was only part of his success; it was mainly thanks to the charge. “From a low standard charge with a decent battery temperature, the Taycan works on anything,” he said.

He used the 350kW chargers from charging company Electrify America and ensured the Taycan was ready to accept his highest input levels. This requires an almost empty and hot battery.

In this state, the Taycan can take up to 260kW and often did. At anything above 50% load, the rate drops dramatically, so it would fill up just enough to reach the next stop in a ready state.