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Car and Driver wrote a good article about how the Taycan 4S handles winter driving. This was at the events at Porsche's Winter Driving School in Lapland Finland.
For starters it looks like the cold didn't affect their range that much, or the Taycan's handling.
Lapland's nasty winter conditions—below-freezing temps with at least four inches of snow on the road at all times—didn't markedly ding the Taycan's own range prediction, which is informed by the last few hundred miles of driving. With the Mamba Green Taycan we drove showing 180 miles of range from a partial charge, we burned off 112 miles of estimated range while covering only 89 snowy Arctic miles at a relatively quick clip. The snow was consistently deep enough that even the 20-inch Goodyear Ultra Grip 245/45R-20 winter tires couldn't find purchase atop the powder, yet the Taycan still felt planted.
But, honestly, on an average unplowed road, this car doesn't feel much different than any all-wheel-drive performance sedan on winter tires. To really suss out the Taycan's advantages, you need a frozen slalom and a wide-open skidpad. Fortunately, Porsche has both those things at the Arctic outpost of the Porsche Driving Experience. It also has a fleet of Cayennes with tow straps, just in case.
Here's how it handed on the course in Lapland.
Running through the slalom, it's immediately evident that Porsche and Tesla have different philosophies when it comes to electrified winter rallying. Porsche wanted the Taycan to feel like a regular sports sedan, so there's barely any energy regeneration when you back off the accelerator pedal. The Sport Plus driving mode gives you the most off-throttle regeneration, but most of the regen comes via the brake pedal, which means in this context, the Taycan doesn't fully capitalize on its dual-motor advantage. In contrast, if you lift off the accelerator and turn the wheel in a Tesla Model 3 Performance with Track Mode, the front and rear motors apply differing degrees of braking to help pivot the rear end around and help the car turn. In the Tesla, you can negotiate a slalom without touching the brake, the car helping to initiate slides via its aggressive regen.
With the Taycan, you drive a snowy slalom as you would in a conventional internal-combustion car, alternating the brake and throttle and countersteering as needed. This is fine, but doing so seems to hold the dual-motor Taycan back from its full potential. Granted, pulling rally moves on a low-friction surface is an admittedly narrow context, but why make a car feel like something it's not just for the sake of familiarity? Why not add a screwing-around-on-snow mode? Let's hope that a software update is in the pipeline.
On the throttle, though, the Taycan is anything but familiar. Depending on the situation, it can switch from rear-wheel drive to all-wheel drive or front-wheel drive, practically instantaneously. The effect is that you can get it way, way sideways, seemingly to the point of no return, and still save it. The tail comes around so far that you think you can see its taillights in your peripheral vision, but if you stay with it (and have room to slide), the Taycan can haul itself back around without spinning. On a skidpad streaked with both grippy snow and bare ice, the 4S found so much grip that the challenge wasn't spinning out but adding enough throttle to keep it tail out in a drift. At one point during a sideways circumnavigation of the pad, that meant adding power until we saw 120 mph of wheel speed versus maybe 15 mph of progress around the chosen radius. The 4S's bag of drift tricks also includes a limited-slip rear differential, brake-based torque vectoring, and four-wheel steering.
All of this works together so seamlessly that the result can be summed up with, "The bad thing that you think is going to happen doesn't." You think you're going to spin, but you don't. You think you'll slide backwards into a snowbank, but then the car claws its way forward. Driving the Taycan 4S with abandon in Finland proved that it's suited for more than life in Miami, although it'll probably work pretty well there, too.https://www.caranddriver.com/photos/g30408034/2020-porsche-taycan-4s-ice-drive-gallery/
For starters it looks like the cold didn't affect their range that much, or the Taycan's handling.
Lapland's nasty winter conditions—below-freezing temps with at least four inches of snow on the road at all times—didn't markedly ding the Taycan's own range prediction, which is informed by the last few hundred miles of driving. With the Mamba Green Taycan we drove showing 180 miles of range from a partial charge, we burned off 112 miles of estimated range while covering only 89 snowy Arctic miles at a relatively quick clip. The snow was consistently deep enough that even the 20-inch Goodyear Ultra Grip 245/45R-20 winter tires couldn't find purchase atop the powder, yet the Taycan still felt planted.
But, honestly, on an average unplowed road, this car doesn't feel much different than any all-wheel-drive performance sedan on winter tires. To really suss out the Taycan's advantages, you need a frozen slalom and a wide-open skidpad. Fortunately, Porsche has both those things at the Arctic outpost of the Porsche Driving Experience. It also has a fleet of Cayennes with tow straps, just in case.
Here's how it handed on the course in Lapland.
Running through the slalom, it's immediately evident that Porsche and Tesla have different philosophies when it comes to electrified winter rallying. Porsche wanted the Taycan to feel like a regular sports sedan, so there's barely any energy regeneration when you back off the accelerator pedal. The Sport Plus driving mode gives you the most off-throttle regeneration, but most of the regen comes via the brake pedal, which means in this context, the Taycan doesn't fully capitalize on its dual-motor advantage. In contrast, if you lift off the accelerator and turn the wheel in a Tesla Model 3 Performance with Track Mode, the front and rear motors apply differing degrees of braking to help pivot the rear end around and help the car turn. In the Tesla, you can negotiate a slalom without touching the brake, the car helping to initiate slides via its aggressive regen.
With the Taycan, you drive a snowy slalom as you would in a conventional internal-combustion car, alternating the brake and throttle and countersteering as needed. This is fine, but doing so seems to hold the dual-motor Taycan back from its full potential. Granted, pulling rally moves on a low-friction surface is an admittedly narrow context, but why make a car feel like something it's not just for the sake of familiarity? Why not add a screwing-around-on-snow mode? Let's hope that a software update is in the pipeline.
On the throttle, though, the Taycan is anything but familiar. Depending on the situation, it can switch from rear-wheel drive to all-wheel drive or front-wheel drive, practically instantaneously. The effect is that you can get it way, way sideways, seemingly to the point of no return, and still save it. The tail comes around so far that you think you can see its taillights in your peripheral vision, but if you stay with it (and have room to slide), the Taycan can haul itself back around without spinning. On a skidpad streaked with both grippy snow and bare ice, the 4S found so much grip that the challenge wasn't spinning out but adding enough throttle to keep it tail out in a drift. At one point during a sideways circumnavigation of the pad, that meant adding power until we saw 120 mph of wheel speed versus maybe 15 mph of progress around the chosen radius. The 4S's bag of drift tricks also includes a limited-slip rear differential, brake-based torque vectoring, and four-wheel steering.
All of this works together so seamlessly that the result can be summed up with, "The bad thing that you think is going to happen doesn't." You think you're going to spin, but you don't. You think you'll slide backwards into a snowbank, but then the car claws its way forward. Driving the Taycan 4S with abandon in Finland proved that it's suited for more than life in Miami, although it'll probably work pretty well there, too.https://www.caranddriver.com/photos/g30408034/2020-porsche-taycan-4s-ice-drive-gallery/
