If there’s one car that’s got everyone buzzing these days, it’s the Porsche Taycan. It’s a new battery electric vehicle from the German automaker, a production version of the Mission E electric concept we first saw in 2015. Deliveries of the car start for some lucky customers before the end of this year, and that means Porsche is starting to open up about the new car.

Ars has an in-depth look at the tech inside the Taycan in the works, but you’ll have to wait until September and the car’s official launch before we can share that with you. In the meantime, though, a few more details have emerged about the car thanks to a new video from the Fully Charged crew.

Fully Charged got an exclusive invite to test Taycan, and they sent Jonny Smith to an airstrip near Stuttgart to check the car out. Smith is no stranger to fast EVs, having turned a 1970s city car into the world’s quickest EV. And after repeatedly demonstrating the Taycan’s launch control—which won’t be quite as quick as a Tesla P100D—he seems pretty impressed with the power delivery from the Porsche’s permanent synchronous motors.

We don’t get to see any of the interior of the car—that’s a secret until later this month. And Smith can’t show us how the charging ports open, either, which suggests some theatrics will be in effect when that feature is revealed. For now we do learn that the car has AC charging ports on both the driver and passenger side, although only one DC fast charge port.

Unlike the Audi e-tron BEV, which was built using the same toolbox as many other Audis and Porsches, the Taycan uses an all-new platform called J1. It has a different 800V architecture than the e-tron, which is one of the factors that will let the car charge at up to 350kW (as long as you can find a charger). Like the Lucid Air, its battery pack—96kWh for the Turbo launch edition—is laid out to leave footwells for its occupants, which helps keep the sedan’s roofline so low. And yes, the top spec Taycan is going to be called the Turbo, because marketing always wins in the end.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1549231