Porsche Macan Turbo EV Makes the Right Moves

We’re hammering along on California’s famed Highway 39, wringing out yet another potent Porsche. Heading up the winding mountainside, we slalom through linked corners as only a downhill skier could. We catch sight of two cars on the straight up ahead and soon dispatch them both without a second thought. As the road tightens further, the tires dig in and respond with even more ferocity. The one thing missing is the wail of a flat-six bouncing off the canyon walls, replaced instead by relative silence, if not for the sound of tires scrabbling for grip. But this is no regular beast from Leipzig. It’s a compact electric SUV, namely the new 2024 Porsche Macan Turbo Electric. Yep, you read that right.

The Macan brakes smartly into the next corner, bleeding off speed and feeding back exactly what is going on through the pedal. The steering, with a quick 14.2:1 ratio, builds smoothly as you bend into a corner, the level of cornering force precisely matching the increase in effort, or at least seeming to. The body rolls, but somehow not as much as before, the effect of the 1329-pound battery pack suspended beneath your feet. The Macan takes a set and carves through the corner, its 255/40 front and 295/35 rear tires on 22-inch wheels gripping tenaciously as it reaches the apex. (Later, at the track, we measure 0.98 g around a 300-foot skidpad.) You feed on the power, perhaps more vigorously than you intended, but the Turbo just puts it down without question, and you fire onward toward the next one.

New EV Platform

This all-new Macan is built on a new electric platform that is based on a 95-kWh battery built from 180 prismatic cells. The pack runs at 800 volts, so it charges quickly—at a rate of up to 270 kilowatts. Porsche says 21 minutes will get you from 10 to 80 percent. Our test runs from 10 to 90 percent, and that took 33 minutes, which isn’t shabby at all, but we did have a look at the 80 percent mark, and that time was 22 minutes. Pretty close. Range varies from 315 miles for the rear-wheel-drive Macan down to 288 for the 4S and the Turbo. Fuel economy is 91 MPGe combined for the Turbo, and we averaged 88 MPGe in our time with the car.

The Turbo Electric is obviously not turbocharged, despite the Turbo badge. You’ll be asked about this constantly, so here’s the deal. Of late, all of Porsche’s gas-powered cars are turbocharged, so the word Turbo has essentially lost all of its meaning. It became merely the name of a particular turbocharged car that is especially quick. Once Turbo came to mean “really quick,” the name was applied to Porsche’s electric vehicles that are… really quick.

Getting Up to Speed Quickly

And indeed, the Macan Turbo Electric is wickedly swift, much quicker that the last 2020 Macan Turbo we tested, even though the electric Macan weighs 989 pounds more. Its two motors team up to produce 630 horsepower, compared to just 434 horsepower for the turbocharged V-6 in the gas-powered model. The Turbo Electric reaches 60 mph in just 2.9 seconds, 100 mph in a mere 7.1 seconds, and 140 mph in a frankly astounding 14.6 seconds. Meanwhile, ye olde gasoline Turbo did the same tricks in 3.5, 9.6, and a belated 22.1 seconds. Yikes. At the quarter-mile, the EV’s 11.1 seconds at 124 mph easily beats the gas version’s 12.2 seconds and 112 mph.

It’s more comparable to the Audi RS7 Performance, which matched it to 60 mph and over a quarter-mile (but was going 1 mph faster when it got there). Heck, the electric Macan Turbo is only behind the Porsche Cayman GT4 RS by a mere tenth to 60 mph and the quarter-mile. When you look at the rolling-start and the passing times, the electric Porsche absolutely annihilates the RS7 and GT4 RS with a performance of 3.2 seconds in the 5-to-60-mph rolling start, 1.3 seconds in 30-to-50-mph passing, and 1.8 seconds in a 50-to-70-mph maneuver. Maybe we should just shut up about the whole Turbo badge thing.

The brakes feel so smooth and predictable that we can’t complain there’s no one-pedal setting; Porsche doesn’t believe in that sort of thing. Your only choices for liftoff regen are Off, which is frankly weird, and On, which merely emulates engine braking and is therefore far preferable. Besides, even though there’s not much lift-throttle regen, there’s still plenty of regen on the pedal, up to 240 kilowatts of it, so you’re not missing out on anything. The brake pedal expertly blends regen with pads-and-rotors braking—you don’t sense any transition at all. In our 70-mph panic stop, the Macan Turbo Electric managed a tidy 150 feet, not bad for a 5440-pound SUV with six-piston iron front brakes.

Through it all, the Turbo Electric rides with much more grace than you’d expect given its optional 22-inch tires. With the air suspension set to Normal mode, it even rolls serenely over the clip-clop nature of the broken concrete nearer to home. Very little upsets it, but when you want to get frisky the available Sport mode drops the ride height approximately one inch and stiffens the damping. Frankly, we kept it in Normal all the way up Highway 39, but we had that in our hip pocket had we needed it. As for the lack of engine sound, there is a Porsche Electric Sport Sound option ($490) that you can turn on, but it was distracting because it masked the sound of the protestations of the tires that we found useful. We leave such things off at the track, where it posted 65 decibels in a 70-mph cruise and rose to only 67 decibels when pinned.

A Bigger Bod

This new Macan looks somewhat softer, and its wheelbase has been stretched by 3.4 inches to 113.9 inches to accommodate the battery. The overall length goes up a like amount, but the height is fractionally lower, and the width is a tad wider. The new nose is slightly more blunt, with the headlights now hidden below the fold and only the DRLs residing in the apparent headlight binnacles. There is a 3-cubic-foot front trunk though. The rear hatch offers 16 cubic feet with the seat up and 44 with them folded down. You’d think that rear-seat accommodations would improve owing to the longer wheelbase, but it’s still a tight squeeze. It’s possible for a 6-foot 2-inch driver to sit behind himself, but the front seat has a central ridge that makes if necessary for tall folk to relax and let their legs splay apart. Of course, the front seat is no problem at all, with our test car’s seats offering oodles of adjustment.

A new central binnacle looks like it came straight out of a modern 911, with a 12.6-inch curved screen and steering-wheel controls that explain themselves beautifully. The shifter looks similar too, and it juts out of the IP just to the right of the curved screen. Further right, the new 10.9-inch central screen now runs a new Android Automotive operating system, and the graphics are much cleaner and simpler than any that came before. In fact, they’ve leaped a generation ahead of the best Porsches. You pair your smartphone wirelessly, whether using Android Auto or Apple CarPlay—the resulting screen-within-a-screen setup looks beautifully simple and operates with impeccable logic.

The space below is the home of the climate controls, and in addition to an obvious centrally mounted volume knob, the whole shebang is given over to physical HVAC switches and knobs. It’s frankly wonderful. The only thing that’s a bit weird is the vents themselves, but that’s a nitpick. They look and operate great, with easy manual adjustments. The niggle is the way you shut them off, because the way you set them obscures the icon. Later, when you look again, you might think they’re off when they’re on or vice versa.

There’s currently no gas-powered Macan Turbo, so it’s hard to compare the electric Macan Turbo’s $106,950 starting price. The last gas-powered Macan Turbo was offered for 2021, priced at $85,950. Based on the price appreciation of other gas-engine Macan models, we imagine a theoretical gas-fueled Macan Turbo would go for around $96,000 today. So, figure the new Turbo Electric commands a $10K premium over one with an actual turbocharger. Considering the performance and the overall goodness, we’d stay that’s a steal.

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