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

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.

Porsche Taycan gets serious updates for 2025

Porsche's original EV effort was always fast. But now, with significant upgrades to efficiency and range, it's more of a long-distance runner than ever before. 

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.

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.

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