anonymouse
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- Joined
- May 12, 2023
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- Location
- Oxfordshire UK
- Vehicles
- Taycan Turbo Sport Turismo J1.2
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- #1
We took our Turbo Sport Turismo for 2,500 miles of wonderful Spring driving through France, northern Spain, Portugal (as far as Porto, then the Duero Valley), and through the Picos de Europa, a mountain range in Northern Spain.
We started with the afternoon ferry Portsmouth-Caen (and discovered a very pleasant and good value first overnight stop, the Hotel LePrince -- allowing for an early morning walk around the Plantagenet old city and a visit to their excellent cathedral). Then down through Burgos, Zamora, Bragança to Porto; a loop around the Duero valley to Pinhão; up to Amarante, Guimarães and Braga (excellent hotel: The Lince). Then back to Spain: Santiago de Compostela, León. Then the Picos. Finally Comillas, Santillana del Mar, and Altamira. And we ended the trip with the tediously long and expensive, but relaxing, ferry Santander-Portsmouth.
The Taycan behaved flawlessly.
It's a seriously great touring car. It is spacious -- we had 2-3 people, luggage, a cool box filled with frozen water bottles, and plenty of room for more. The frunk is very helpfully spacious: we carried an EVSE, extension cables and plug adapters (none of which are needed for a road trip these days), a battery-powered tyre inflator, a large bundle of cleaning cloths and assorted cleaning kits ... and there was still plenty of room for our rain gear and two pairs of walking shoes.
It was super comfortable throughout, the sports seats providing good support and grip; and Active Ride helped the passenger to keep comfortable through twists and turns.
But more importantly, it drives like a Porsche. In the Picos we did two solid days of driving, almost all on roads like this:
And wow, can this car hold a line on hour after hour of twisty roads! Brilliant.
No doubt someone is going to ask about range. Well, I simply never looked at the guess-o-meter and I have no idea how many "miles" it will do: the answer is "plenty". I made a plan for the trip using A Better Route Planner, and dropped a few 350kW chargers into the route plus a couple of overnight hotel stops and a couple of 100kW chargers in the more remote parts of Portugal. Beyond that there was just no need to worry about charging. Europe has fast chargers all over the place now, and the J1.2 is so fast to charge that we barely notice a few stops.
Our only small issue was in Portugal, where our Porsche Charging Service card failed on every network we tried. However we soon discovered that it was possible to start and stop charging with the Porsche app, which serves just as well. Apparently in Portugal there is some funky local regulation that charging card providers need to meet, and very few do. Even one of their own major networks does not yet have an app because they are finding it hard to comply. They also don't have QR codes or the standard European charger identification numbers. But the app worked fine once we discovered how to click through to the right page that starts charging remotely.
For route planning we used, and highly recommend, MyRouteApp (MRA). It has a great library of routes, mostly built by mad bikers who like curves and hills
. And when you plan your own route, you can see at a glance which roads are scenic (either by using the Michelin map overlay or MRAs own computed roads), then put pins to pull the car away from highways and onto the interesting roads. We used MRA's routes as a basis for our Duero Valley and Picos legs and it worked very well indeed. We used MRA on CarPlay to navigate through the backroads part, and the regular PCM satnav for anything where we wanted the fastest route to a destination.
If you've only used your Taycan for commuting, you have really missed out on the amazing things it can do. Get out on a road trip!
We started with the afternoon ferry Portsmouth-Caen (and discovered a very pleasant and good value first overnight stop, the Hotel LePrince -- allowing for an early morning walk around the Plantagenet old city and a visit to their excellent cathedral). Then down through Burgos, Zamora, Bragança to Porto; a loop around the Duero valley to Pinhão; up to Amarante, Guimarães and Braga (excellent hotel: The Lince). Then back to Spain: Santiago de Compostela, León. Then the Picos. Finally Comillas, Santillana del Mar, and Altamira. And we ended the trip with the tediously long and expensive, but relaxing, ferry Santander-Portsmouth.
The Taycan behaved flawlessly.
It's a seriously great touring car. It is spacious -- we had 2-3 people, luggage, a cool box filled with frozen water bottles, and plenty of room for more. The frunk is very helpfully spacious: we carried an EVSE, extension cables and plug adapters (none of which are needed for a road trip these days), a battery-powered tyre inflator, a large bundle of cleaning cloths and assorted cleaning kits ... and there was still plenty of room for our rain gear and two pairs of walking shoes.
It was super comfortable throughout, the sports seats providing good support and grip; and Active Ride helped the passenger to keep comfortable through twists and turns.
But more importantly, it drives like a Porsche. In the Picos we did two solid days of driving, almost all on roads like this:
And wow, can this car hold a line on hour after hour of twisty roads! Brilliant.
No doubt someone is going to ask about range. Well, I simply never looked at the guess-o-meter and I have no idea how many "miles" it will do: the answer is "plenty". I made a plan for the trip using A Better Route Planner, and dropped a few 350kW chargers into the route plus a couple of overnight hotel stops and a couple of 100kW chargers in the more remote parts of Portugal. Beyond that there was just no need to worry about charging. Europe has fast chargers all over the place now, and the J1.2 is so fast to charge that we barely notice a few stops.
Our only small issue was in Portugal, where our Porsche Charging Service card failed on every network we tried. However we soon discovered that it was possible to start and stop charging with the Porsche app, which serves just as well. Apparently in Portugal there is some funky local regulation that charging card providers need to meet, and very few do. Even one of their own major networks does not yet have an app because they are finding it hard to comply. They also don't have QR codes or the standard European charger identification numbers. But the app worked fine once we discovered how to click through to the right page that starts charging remotely.
For route planning we used, and highly recommend, MyRouteApp (MRA). It has a great library of routes, mostly built by mad bikers who like curves and hills
. And when you plan your own route, you can see at a glance which roads are scenic (either by using the Michelin map overlay or MRAs own computed roads), then put pins to pull the car away from highways and onto the interesting roads. We used MRA's routes as a basis for our Duero Valley and Picos legs and it worked very well indeed. We used MRA on CarPlay to navigate through the backroads part, and the regular PCM satnav for anything where we wanted the fastest route to a destination.
If you've only used your Taycan for commuting, you have really missed out on the amazing things it can do. Get out on a road trip!
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