If you had to drive across the US in an electric car, how much time do you think you would spend charging it?
It's 2384.5 miles, by the way, and the car is a basic rear-wheel-drive Porsche Taycan with the optional big 84kWh battery, which achieves a maximum range of 301 miles on the European WLTP test and 225 miles on the more pessimistic/realistic American EPA one.
So how long would you spend plugged in? You would start in Los Angeles with a full battery and finish in New York with an empty one, of course, so you would get your first 300 miles (or so) for nothing and pant over the finish line. And you might stop, what, 10 times, for an hour each time, if you drove carefully and used only nice big juicy chargers.
That’s not good enough for Guinness World Record holder Wayne Gerdes, who is a dab hand at EV endurance testing. Over six days in late 2021, he set a new record by driving a Taycan coast to coast while spending just two hours, 26 minutes and 48 seconds charging it.
That broke the previous record (a respectable seven hours, 10 minutes and one second, achieved in a Kia EV6) by almost five hours.
Gerdes is an expert in hypermiling and talks about it on his enthusiastic website, cleanmpg.com. Hypermiling, if you don’t know, is the craft of squeezing as much economy out of a vehicle as possible. The further Gerdes could maximise the Taycan’s range, the less charging it would need.
But that was just part of his success; it was mainly thanks to charging. “From a low standard charge with a decent battery temperature, the Taycan just walks over everything,” he said.
He used charging company Electrify America’s 350kW chargers and made sure the Taycan was ready to accept its highest input levels. That requires a near-empty and warm battery.
In that state, the Taycan can take up to 260kW and often did. At anything above 50% charge, the rate dramatically drops, so he would fill just enough to reach the next stop in a ready state.
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Hypermiling is a " thing" in America and compared to the UK you'd be happy with 400 miles range which would be enough to go from Landsend into the middle of the North, but we know, at the moment at least, that's not feasible...yet.
Pretty impressive although this achievement will probably slip under the radar of most Americans. Can you imagine the coverage Clarkson would have got if he attempts the same journey in a Nissan Leaf?