Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo Review: One Half Of Our New Dream Two-Car Garage

I’m not sure ‘crossover’ is the right word to describe the Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo. Yes, it rides 20mm higher than the saloon in all modes, but that doesn’t exactly result in a monster truck ride.

You don’t even have to have the grey plastic cladding - it’s body-coloured unless Porsche‘s Off Road Design package (which bumps the Gravel mode ride height up by an extra 10mm) is specced. Really, this is just a Taycan estate with a fancy name and the potential for some very light off-piste ability. And that, it turns out, is a wonderful thing.

The driving experience is a deja vu affair - it feels much like the saloon. This ‘Turbo’ model still feels brazenly quick when you put your foot down, with an especially rabid throttle response in Sport Plus. And unlike most EVs, the shock and awe of the initial organ compression isn’t followed by dull linearity.

As on the saloon, there’s a two-speed gearbox on the rear axle, with the larger of the two cogs used most of the time. The smaller comes into play when you’re in Sport or Sport Plus for faster acceleration, or if you’re hoofing it in Normal mode. It’s about half the size of the larger cog, which takes over via a noticeable shift at 50mph.

You’re looking at 616bhp in this £116,950 model, which jumps to 671bhp when ‘overboost’ is engaged. That gives a 0-62mph time of 3.3 seconds, a mere tenth down on the saloon, and still fast enough to give a lot of supercars something to worry about. Spending £139,910 on the Turbo S, which does the same in 2.9sec, seems a little excessive.

As well as feeling just as fast in a straight line, it’s a similar experience in the corners too. As a kick-off, the brake pedal is nice and progressive, a feeling you don’t get in a lot of EVs. The steering, while lacking meaningful feedback, is near enough perfect in terms of weighting, speed and predictability. And finally, grip and traction are awfully impressive.

When really pushed, though, the differences between this and the saloon do start to subtly emerge. There isn’t a huge increase in weight to worry about, with the Turbo only gaining 15kg relative to its four-door cousin, but the suspension setup is softer as well as loftier.

The CT doesn’t hide its weight as well as the saloon, and it does feel a little more unwieldy and prone to understeer than the four-door, if not dramatically so. In any case, a good prod of the throttle counters this with some easily controllable oversteer.

Most of the time, it feels scarcely different. The physical suspension bits are broadly the same, albeit with new wheel mounts and spring strut supports due to the increased range of the airbags.

Even with that new boot on the rear, the Taycan still feels reasonable compact inside. Sure enough, put the rear seats down, and it doesn’t have the most commodious boot, with 1200 litres of space available. For comparison, it’s more like 1700 in something like an Audi RS6. That’ll be down to the RS6 not having a massive slab of battery cells hiding under the carpet.

Although we didn’t get the chance to load it up with a mountain bike or some IKEA flat-pack furniture, it doesn’t look like it’ll be too arduous loading stuff in there. The boot lip is a tad high and the load bay is fairly narrow at the opening, but we’ve seen worse.

Given the respectable real-world range comfortably over 200 miles (so long as you’re not arsing about with the launch control all the time), it’s an EV that’ll do it all. And since the premium over the saloon isn’t big enough to lose sleep over, the Cross Turismo a no brainer, although we’d probably ignore the £116,950 Turbo and go for the still very fast 4S at £87,820.
One of those and a 911 seems like the ideal two-car garage, don’t you think?

Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo Turbo Specs

Engine: twin permanently excited motors
Power: 671bhp
Torque: 626lb ft
0-62mph: 3.3
Top speed: 155mph (limited)
Price: £116,950