If the performance is repeatable, there’s good news ahead for the battery-electric Porsche Macan and anyone who buys it. The automaker took two prototypes to Southern California and put Edmunds writer Brian Wong in the driver’s seat of one of them. The plan: A very unscientific out-and-back range test at 70 miles per hour. Wong intended to leave his hotel, hit the highway, drive east at 70 miles per hour on L.A. freeways for as long as possible, and when the battery state-of-charge indicator got close to the halfway mark, turn around and drive back to the hotel at 70 mph. If successful, he’d reach the valet stand at the end of the ride “with close to 0 miles remaining but not so close that I’d risk running the battery dry,” having achieved an average speed of at least 40 mph. Wong didn’t cite a potential range number, and when he asked for predictions from the Porsche engineers riding with him, they said they didn’t know, since, “This isn’t something we’ve really done before.”
The two Macan EVs represented two of the coming trims. Wong drove what will be the top trim, revealed earlier to have about 603 horsepower and more than 737 pound-feet of torque. A Porsche engineer followed in the lower trim.
We really like the unscientific aspect. Everyone who drives is frighteningly aware that most driving on U.S. roads is the opposite of measured, precise, and scientific. Wong drove with two other adults, in Normal driving mode, and said he couldn’t even even use the climate control’s Eco setting because that let the cabin get “unbearably hot rather quickly.” This is how an owner would drive.
The biggest variable, traffic, cooperated on the day. Wong wrote that back at the hotel, the Macan’s gauges showed 298 miles covered and seven miles left in the “tank” at an average speed “just north of 60 mph.” Sounds to us like an exceptional performance.
On a separate note, Edmunds maintains a leaderboard of real-world DC fast-charging rates among production EVs, tallying how many miles an EV’s pack replenishes in an hour and how long it takes to add 100 miles. The 2020 Porsche Taycan 4S is fourth on the list of miles replenished per hour of DC fast-charging, at 690 miles. The sedan is second in the rank for how long it takes to add 100 miles, at 8 minutes and 41 seconds. The Macan’s 100-kWh battery is of greater capacity than the Taycan’s 93-kWh pack. At a max charging rate of 270-kW for both vehicles, depending on the Macan’s chemistry, the Taycan’s numbers should still be instructive.
The Macan EV’s lower trim did even better than the hi-po version, so head over to Edmunds for the recap.
