"Resume: Even so, the Polestar’s is a much richer, more pleasant and more luxurious place for two to travel in than is either the AMG’s or the Porsche’s. Where the Taycan’s cabin is bigger on touchscreen technology but is ultimately more restrained and less ornate, and the AMG’s is more spacious and more overtly sporting, the Polestar’s is the bubble of sophisticated luxury that would make touring an easy pleasure. It juggles comfort, visibility, refinement, perceived quality and sense-of-occasion richness the best of the trio – and to drive, it has all the performance and handling appeal you’d expect in a biggish, expensive GT, although it doesn’t reset any preconceptions."
The news
out of Whitehall earlier this month seemed very much like the death sentence
for the internal combustion engine that so many of us have been dreading,
didn’t it? And with it there also came a numbering of days for all sorts of
vehicle that it’s hard to imagine being powered in any other way.
Well, maybe
not. Things can change, after all, and where government policy is concerned,
they usually do. But if prime minister Johnson’s new car electrification plan
for 2035, or perhaps 2032, sticks, it’s likely to accelerate a global move
towards ever more ambitious sustainability legislation, as the AK47 of public
opinion gets aimed ever more squarely at the undeserving temple of the
traditional piston-engined automobile.
When the
shots are finally heard, we must simply hope that they mark an important
beginning as well as an end. If there is to be no place at all for internal
combustion in new cars sold just 15 years from now, then at least the certainty
of that decree ought to give even greater impetus to the development of
electric car technology than it has thus far had. It certainly needs to. From
what you might call our 20th century legacy perspective, it’s hard to fathom
how the sheer breadth and variety of the car market as it is today might be
supported entirely by batteries and electric motors and so few public charging
stations. We must have faith that it won’t seem like such a leap in a decade or
so.
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Tightening
our focus in, we must also hope and trust that the classic fast grand touring
car will survive the transition. It’s one of the oldest automotive types of
them all, and one linked inextricably with our very earliest, most formative
and most romantic notions of motoring. The GT has done quite well already to
survive more than a century of development, containing within that span a
couple of world wars, several oil and economic crises and the rise and rise of
budget airlines which, in some countries, sprang up as early as the 1970s.
In spite of
all that, with a long way to go and a short time to get there, plenty of us
still choose to travel under our own steam, according to our own schedule and
route and in our own company – by car. And for those who do, here’s the good
news: there is much heart to be found in the very latest ultra-modern fast GT
cars, such that the traditions of 600-mile-a-day road trips will continue to be
possible, at speed and in style, once we’ve reached the end of this ‘road to
zero’ glidepath on which we now seem to be set so firmly. A couple of days like
those I’ve just experienced, on the still magnificent and sparsely trafficked Route
Napoleon and the surrounding roads of the French Prealps, with a couple of the
most wanted, new-age electrified grand tourers for company – and a good
combustion-engined fast GT car to provide the necessary context – is all it
takes to make you feel significantly better about the future of longdistance
motoring.
On our road
trip was one of our favourite fast GT cars of the moment: the Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S 4-Door Coupé. A bit of a dinosaur, some might
say – and possibly more oil tanker than oil painting, I grant. But as a
yardstick of the sheer breadth and varied ability of the modern
combustion-engined GT car, to represent everything it can do better, perhaps,
than the very height of luxury and elegance it can reach, it takes some
beating.
A 630bhp
4.0-litre turbocharged V8 engine mated to an active torque-vectoring four-wheel
drive system makes it capable of performance you can call supercar-level
without a moment’s pause: 0-62mph in 3.2sec, 196mph flat out. The car feels
every bit as quick on the road as those figures would imply, but it knows
comfort and dynamic versatility just as well. It has a good-sized cabin with
four usable doors and the same number of usable adult-sized seats, plus a boot
that will swallow a long weekend’s luggage for as many passengers without the
slightest issue.
As we’ve
reported many times, this car comes bristling with AMG-typical driver appeal and performance
character, ready to handle as well as any bigger sports car but also to reach
across long distances in real comfort. And so it is in so many ways the
complete any-occasion grand tourer. It comes with a 66-litre petrol tank which,
with up to 32mpg possible on a long run, allows you to cover 450 miles between
stops – and it can be refilled in less time than it takes your passengers to
log into the service station’s free wi-fi and check Whatsapp.
That kind of
usable range and recharging capability remains well beyond the all-electric GT
for now, but not quite so for the plug-in hybrid. To represent the latter,
enter the stunning Polestar 1. Its eye-catching design should achieve one of
this debut model’s intended purposes – which is to invite onlookers to wonder
what on earth a Polestar is – with impact to spare.
Underneath
the square-set, emphatically proportioned CFRP bodywork lies a ‘twincharged’
2.0-litre four-cylinder petrol engine and a trio of electric motors that can
combine to make for as much as 591bhp and 738lb ft while also offering
four-wheel drive. There’s enough battery capacity for a real-world 60-70 miles
of zero-emissions running, and then a fuel tank with enough for about 250 miles
of ‘range-extended’ petrol running on the top. The catch? That such a
configuration makes the Polestar the heaviest and slowest car of our trio –
although, with 62mph coming up from rest in a whisker over four seconds and a
155mph top speed, it’s still quick enough to cover ground very nicely indeed
when the occasion calls for it. This is a driver’s car and no mistake –
although it is by no means an ideal one.
Not
compared with the remarkable Porsche Taycan Turbo S, whose driving experience we’ll
come to in a moment. Porsche’s first electric car was always unlikely to
be any half-measure, and yet wrapping your head around this car’s abilities
doesn’t immediately get much easier after your first test drive than it is
while simply attempting to digest the technical breakdown: up to 751bhp and
774lb ft of torque for full-bore launches, 0-62mph in as little as 2.8sec, more
than 160mph in full flight, four usable seats and naff all emissions. Reconcile
that lot, and all from the same car, if you possibly can.
The
range-topping Taycan Turbo S comes with an official WLTP range of between 241
and 256 miles, depending on specification, and it has rapid-charging capability
to take its 93kWh battery from 5% charge to 80%, where there is a rapid charger
of sufficient power, in less than 23 minutes. As EV owners will tell you, 350kW
public chargers remain pretty rare things at present, but as they proliferate
on motorway networks, and just off them, around Europe over the next few years,
it should be entirely possible to plan 600-mile days in a Taycan in a not-dissimilar
fashion to how you plan them in any other GT car.
The
question for touring in electric cars, it seems to me, is whether you’re happy
to be bound to a pre-ordained route and schedule, and to have your journey and
experience effectively defined by the nearest rapid chargers along it. If,
however, you prefer to simply nurture your adventurous spirit and to point the
prow of your car in roughly the right direction – to take the road less
travelled as and when you fancy, and to worry about how and where you refuel
when the need arises – well, perhaps electric long-distance motoring isn’t for
you. Perhaps it never will be; time will tell.
Whichever
way you prefer to plan your journeys, it will be a while before any electric GT
can beat the GT 63 S for ease of use. For straightforward ownership appeal,
though, it’s the Polestar that you’d choose out of this trio, I reckon. It’s
nowhere near as practical as the Mercedes, with 2+2 seating that would only ever make it
a four-seater with younger kids in the second row, and even then over shorter
trips only. The layout of the car’s power management electronics also means
boot space is limited, and there’s no chance of loading longer items through
into the cabin.
Even so,
the Polestar’s is a much richer, more pleasant and more luxurious place for two
to travel in than is either the AMG’s or the Porsche’s. Where the Taycan’s
cabin is bigger on touchscreen technology but is ultimately more restrained and
less ornate, and the AMG’s is more spacious and more overtly sporting, the
Polestar’s is the bubble of sophisticated luxury that would make touring an
easy pleasure. It juggles comfort, visibility, refinement, perceived quality
and sense-of-occasion richness the best of the trio – and to drive, it has all
the performance and handling appeal you’d expect in a biggish, expensive GT,
although it doesn’t reset any preconceptions.
Which is
precisely what the Taycan does do, and in all sorts of ways. You wonder, to
begin with, how it is that a car that seems reasonably compact on the outside –
that seats you so low, that has such a low scuttle and that seems so sporting
on the face of things – can possibly weigh 2.3 tonnes. It simply doesn’t look
like it does. It really doesn’t drive like it does, either, but that’s the
upshot of being seated so low, in among the pouch cells that power the car’s
twin electric motors rather than on top of them, I suppose. Not to mention
simply the result of what happens when you give designers and engineers from
Porsche, rather than from any other car maker, a clean-sheet brief to come up
with the very best electric driver’s car imaginable.
It takes
something special to comprehensively out-punch a 630bhp AMG on outright
performance and handling dynamism, but the Taycan Turbo S manages to do both on
the road. Holy moly, this car is quick. When picking up from low speed, it
feels even more breathtaking both for response and outright power than you dare
expect it might. This is a car whose throttle you squeeze – and you do so
carefully at first.
But unlike
the other high-end electrically powered offerings that this embryonic market
niche has seen hitherto, the Taycan handles every bit as well as it goes – and
it stops very well indeed. It steers as well as any Porsche barring perhaps the
best GT-department specials. It turns flat, grips hard and contains it body
movements tightly, at least until you hit very high speeds. It also manages to
deliver the cornering balance and handling poise you would sooner expect from a
1500kg, mid-engined sports car.
So yes,
it’s driver’s car, and a sensational one at that when driven really hard. It’s
most alike to some next-generation Nissan GT-R than anything else, but with even greater
handling poise, tactile feedback and sheer wallop than that would suggest. And
that’s why, given the option of all three cars to take for one more tilt down a
testing road, it’s the Taycan I’d pick here and now – and probably again and
again. Trying to fathom how it does what it does – and exactly how it can make
the GT 63 S, which you might imagine ought to handle better because it is, in
fact, 250kg lighter, feel like it’s the heavier car – is one of the most
superbly bewildering tasks I’ve had in this job.
None of
which makes it a grand tourer, of course, which brings us to the summing up of
this exercise with no little complexity to negotiate. The Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S
4-Door Coupé, Polestar 1 and Porsche Taycan Turbo S may all occupy similar
notional market territory, but they will appeal for very different reasons, to
very different people and for quite different intended purposes.
You might
imagine that, with the ‘road to zero’ picture looking like it does, I’d
recommend that someone with the means to be in this particular market should
buy the Mercedes now, while they still can, before the public mood and
legislative context turns irrevocably against it; the Polestar in a few years,
it being an ideal bridge and introduction to an electrified touring future; and
the Taycan in perhaps another few years more, when the world is ready to better
support owning and charging it.
That sounds
like a very reasonable argument. Trouble is, with the memory of all three cars
and an epic couple of days now hardened but still fresh in the mind, the
Porsche is all I can think about. How on earth does it perform and handle like
that? How have they hidden all that weight so well? Could I possibly find a way
to make it fit into my life?
Truly great
cars have a habit of leaving you thus bewitched and bewildered, stuck for
explanations. And GT or not, we can be sure of this much if nothing else: the
Porsche Taycan deserves absolutely no less a billing than that.
Source: Autocar.
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