Porsche Cayenne EV has 1100HP and Wireless Charging!
Okay, so there’s a lot of deja vu in this video because one, last time I got invited out to see a cool new Porsche, I couldn’t make it because I had to go to an ultimate frisbee tournament and Miles was able to go. All right, I’m here. Please bear with me for for a minute. That’s true again. This time it’s Portugal for Beach World Championships, but Miles is out there. I promise this will not take super long. And two, because the last time Porsche unveiled a new EV, I was really tempted to switch. Almost there. That was a Porsche Tyan and I had a Tesla Model S at the time. This time, Porsche’s unveiling the new electric Cayenne. I swear we’re actually almost there. And you guys may or may not know, I’ve been a Rivian R1T person for a couple years now. Would I switch door number two? And that’s an interesting question. It’s maybe not a onetoone analog like the Tyan and the Model S were to each other, but a full-size four-seater that’s electric to carry stuff around, carry people around and daily, especially when it’s garbage weather like this in New Jersey is really appealing. And and Porsche does a good job with that stuff. So, almost there. Miles, if you don’t mind, break it down. What is the electric Cayenne? Is it like a replacement for one of the trims or is it adding to the lineup? What is the electric Cayenne? Okay, sorry for the wait, but uh here it is. Okay, so this is a Cayenne but electric. But unlike other companies who are fully replacing their internal combustion engine models, this is just an alternative. So if you want the gas version of the Cayenne, which we have over there, you can get that. But if you want the IC version, that’s what this is for. And then there will eventually be new versions of the IC Cayenne that look similar to this. But this is the turbo model, and this is probably the most different that a Cayenne has looked uh in a long time. Porsche is usually not one to make major changes between generation, but the electric version of the Cayenne, this is there’s a lot going on here that we we we got to get into this. Okay, so my immediate question is what are they going to do with the design? They could just make it a Porsche Cayenne but electric and you can’t even tell by looking at it. But sometimes they do light bars and other fun EV type of styling stuff. So I’m curious what type of stuff Porsche is doing. Is it like a mega tyan or is it just another Cayenne? So we’ve seen spy shots of this car for a long time now, but this is the unccloaked version. And the first thing you notice are the new headlights. So the headlights on the Cayenne have been getting progressively more squared off and less rounded off. This is very much like Tyan. I think if you put this and the Tyken headlight next to each other, they would look pretty similar. But the major thing here are these active arrow flaps. This is something that we first saw on the 911 Carrera GTS and obviously the new Turos S that we just reviewed. So, we have them on SUVs now. I think we’re starting to see a trend of where Porsche is going with their design language. But this isn’t just aesthetics oriented. These are fully functional active arrow flaps that open and close depending on your speed and what drive mode you’re in. And then this right here is functional arrow. You have air that travels through here to make sure you get maximum range and efficiency. In the US, you’ll have the option of getting between a 20, 21, and 22in wheel. We have the 22s here. You have see the nice meaty sidewall. But let’s actually take a look at this brake setup right here. So these are the carbon ceramic brakes. These are optional for the turbo, but I’m told that there is an iron cast brake that you can get that I believe over 400 mm wide. One of the largest iron cast brakes you can get on any car, period. When we get into power, I think you’ll realize that maybe having carbon ceramics for the turbo model is the right move, but we’ll we’ll get into that a bit later. But this is this is not a slow car. We’ll we’ll just put it we’ll just put it that way. I can’t show you this yet because this is an early model, but behind this is an NACS port. the very first time that Porsche has an NACS port built into the car without the need for an adapter. And because it’s on the left side, this is where you’re going to be doing your DC super fast charging. And then when you go to the other side, we have our second door port as is customary on electric Porsches. You open that and that is your AC charger for doing like slower charging like at home or at at a slower charger. So, looking at the back half of the Cayenne EV, this is a a very familiar shape right here. But you’ll notice that as opposed to on IC versions of the Cayenne, at least currently, you now have the active arrow flap up here. And you can see it go up like that, which I actually think looks better than what you have on the IC version of Cayenne. I I’m so used to seeing like soccer moms driving their Cayenne with the arrow wing up at like 20 mph, and I’m like, what’s the point? Uh but then down here we have the active arrow blades. This is something that’s brand new for a Porsche having these active blades on like the side of the car to help aerodynamics and efficiency. And you can see right there. So right here are the coordinates for the wind tunnel in the Weiss factory in at the Porsche building in Germany, which is actually pretty cool. It’s a nice little Easter egg. But these will open and close depending on your speed and what drive mode you’re in. It’s I think it might take some getting used to, but it it definitely adds to the sporty like aggressiveness. I could I could see this being on something like a GT3 RS and like, you know, whatever future versions of that car are coming. I would say between everything like the new headlights or the three-dimensional side skirts or all the crazy arrow features, the wing on the back, the arrow blades, I think this is the most substantial design update for the kind that’s ever happened. Okay, interesting looks. I guess the next obvious question is what are they doing with the powertrains? Like are there different levels to the thing? Because it’s Porsche and they do performance stuff really well. I figured if I worked at Porsche, I couldn’t help competing with the quickest of these or maybe Lucid Gravities or R1S’s. Surely there’s a turbo. Before we talk about the interior, let’s talk about powertrains because this man, this is pretty substantial. What’s what’s going on here as far as power upgrades in the new Cayenne EV? This is going to be this is going to be a fast car. Let’s let’s just put it that way. So, the standard Cayenne is going to have a little over 400 horsepower and give you an extra 20-ish horsepower when you want to do launch control in that car. Get you to 0 to 60 in under 5 seconds. pretty pretty standard stuff. The car I’m sitting in right now though, the Cayenne Turbo Electric. This is getting out of hand. I I just got to say this is getting out of hand. This car will be effectively neck and neck with the new 992.2 911 Turbo S off the line 0 to 60 without roll out by the way, 2.4 seconds. And then the 1/4 mile sub 10 9.9. We’re running nines in SUVs now. What in stock SUVs? What is What is going on? So, this car is a little under 850 horsepower in the standard mode. And then when you click the push to pass button right here in the steering wheel, that gets you an extra 173 horsepower. But then when you want to do launch control, you have a max output of almost,50 horsepower and,00 lb feet of torque. This is a monster SUV. And from what I hear, this is not the fastest one. I hear there’s a a Turbo GT model that’s possibly been seen driving around and and spy shots and whatnot. So, we haven’t even reached the peak flagship model yet, and we’re already basically competing with the 911 Turbo S. So, we’ll talk about cost and how much it actually will cost you to get this amount of performance. But as far as it actually being competitive with an R1S or like a Lucid Gravity, I mean, off the top of my head, I think that would automatically make this the most capable electric SUV out on the road right now. Maybe the most capable electric car of just this size out on the road right now. A sub 10 when this thing’s got to be like 6,000 plus pounds. That is just Porsche. You Wow. Yeah. All right. I got to know if Porsche has improved on the range and charging capabilities on the Cayenne. I say improved because the Tyan kind of got away with not being the best battery or the best range, but that’s okay. It’s a sports car. We’re not super concerned with efficiency. But this is a family hauler. I don’t think you can get away with that anymore. So, did they um we’re at 46% right now and we’ve got about 139 mi of range. I don’t know how this car has been driven prior to me sitting in the car, but I mean based on what I’m seeing here, it feels like somewhere in the realm of high 200s, low 300s is very much possible with this car. So, when comparing this with other high-performance electric SUVs, this is definitely going to be keeping up with vehicles like the Rivian R1S and then the Lucid Gravity. 300 plus miles of range and 1,000 horsepower electric SUV, that’s not too bad. And for people who are buying this car, specifically the turbo variant of the electric Cayenne, 300 plus miles of range is going to be pretty usable. Porsche has been good. Firstly, soft closed doors standard on every model of the Cayenne, by the way, which is really sick. Um, but Porsche has been good about making sure that their cars are running on the best possible battery architecture available effectively. So, this car is running on an 800vt system and thanks to that, you should be able to charge from 10 to 80 using DC charging and the most ideal conditions in under 20 minutes, which is pretty good. Obviously, it’s an 113 kWh battery pack and using DC charging, it has a max capability of 400 kW charging, which is obviously, I think, pretty quick. Okay, so I also heard that this car is supposed to wirelessly charge. Now, wired charging for a big EV battery is hard enough, but what is the deal? Is this supposed to be real? Like for the whole battery? I understand we’ll probably be able to get our hands on a version of this hopefully in New Jersey pretty soon and really test it, but is it similar to what we saw with like the McLaren Speed Tail driving over that puck and then charging a little hybrid battery or is this next level like really fully charging the car? What we have here is a wireless charger. So, the only other car that I’ve ever encountered that has a wireless charging system of any kind was the McLaren Speed Tail. We reviewed that car on the main channel a while ago and that had a much more complicated, much more expensive, much more unreliable wireless charging system. I’ll demo it for you in a second, but I mean, generally speaking, as long as the wireless charging pad is connected to either the built-in LTE or Wi-Fi in your home, you more or less just drive the Cayenne on and then it starts charging at up to 11 kW, which is actually pretty good. So, let’s let’s see how it works. So, you obviously have to step in the cayenne at first. Okay. And then you should be able to go to the charging setting, inductive charging. Then go and drive. And then you see here we have these guidelines, right? And so this is to make sure that you are actually on the charger to get the optimal charge obviously. So then after that you just drive forward. And then as I’m turning the wheel here, you can see it adjusting. You drive forward, drive forward. And now we see that green dot to let you know where you need to land effectively. So I’m going to turn the wheel a little bit. Adjust a little bit more. A little bit more. Boom. And that’s it. Hit park. And then you’ll see here on the display that it should start charging, which is which is pretty sick. You’ll see the charging speed quickly jumping up. And I find it pretty impressive how quickly it goes up to nearly 11 kW of charging. It’s it’s pretty much almost there. when we filmed that speed tail a while ago, that had a much much more complicated uh charging sequence where you had a separate tablet where you had to control everything and it was just I hear that a lot of customers actually pay to have that feature removed and just plug it in with a cable because it’s much more simple and reliable. This is actually really cool and from what I’ve been told, the pad is weather resistant as well. So, you could in theory have this charging pad outside. You could also back onto the charger. don’t have to drive forward directly onto the charger. If you’re going to do wireless charging in a car, I think this so far is the the way to do it. It seems pretty easy. It seems like the pad itself isn’t super sensitive to environments. So, you could have it in harsh weather, snow, rain. If there’s like cats underneath the car that are like messing with the charger or something, it will, you know, interrupt the charging speed and power to make sure you’re not, you know, zapping anything under there. and will notify you on your Porsche app on your phone to let you know, hey, just letting you know the charging got interrupted a little bit. This is a it’s a very impressive system. I’m not going to lie. And the fact that this is coming for a non-hypercar semi-attainable product is is pretty impressive. All right. Well, the next question is just about the general interior. They can do a lot or a little with it, but I saw some pictures of this crazy interior with like a huge curved screen. looked a little ridiculous in the renders, but I’m curious if it looks better in person if you think that’s something you’d want to live with. Let’s talk about the interior. So, I mean, if you sat me in here and didn’t tell me what this was, right, I would just assume this is a Porsche Cayenne of some sorts, right? Because of the the spacing on the inside and all the much more premium touch points compared to something like a Macan. But there’s some interesting things going on here, mainly with the displays, which I’m sure you can already notice. First thing, we have a curved gauge cluster, which is brand new for the Cayenne. And it’s actually pretty subtle. I mean, when just looking at the gauge cluster from my point of view, you notice it, but it’s something your your eyes kind of get used to in a matter of seconds. This, however, is a bit different. So, there were some photos of this car online when they did the initial press release for the Cayenne Electric, and I think to certain people, it wasn’t super uh appealing visually speaking. I talked to Porsche about this, about why they decided to go with a screen like this for the Cayenne, and apparently this is a result of kind of amalgamating a bunch of customer feedback. So, I mean, obviously you can’t have buttons for every single thing, right? And thankfully, we still do have buttons for the important stuff. We have our volume right here. Okay, radio still on. And then we have our temperature control, uh, you know, windshield, automax, all that fun stuff, right? And then for the seats, you have the ventilation button, the heating button. I I just swapped those. I don’t know why, but you have all that stuff ready and accessible. But apparently customers wanted buttons for the important stuff but wanted less points of interaction. Meaning they didn’t want two screens. They wanted one screen. They wanted as few screens as humanly possible. So as opposed to doing two separate screens, they just decided, hey, let’s just do one screen and then make it curved. And so you have basically the the bottom half of the screen here to control uh like things like the menu and kind of hit certain different menus in the car. And then up here is where you’re going to have like your CarPlay and things like that. Or you hit this button and you can control the the frunk, the trunk, the uh charging ports, things like that, which we’ll we’ll have to talk about the frunk and the trunk a bit later. But uh to be honest, using it, I’m not like horrifically offended by this screen. To be honest, it’s not too bad. I think it just takes a minute to get used to. And I mean, I really don’t want to know how much it would cost if you like crack the display or something like that. But, uh, I mean, it’s not as bad as I think the photos would imply it is. But, as far as curved displays go, I think this is one of the better implementations of it. And it doesn’t feel awkward to use. I guess that’s what I was like worried about is that using this would feel awkward, but it it it doesn’t. And then we also have this new LED light strip on the dashboard that is not only aesthetic, but it’s functional as well. So, we have like these mood modes here. So, if I change my mood mode, you’ll see the color change on these LED strips. But these LED strips are also for functional purposes as well. So, when you’re climbing onto your wireless charging pad, I don’t know why I said climbing on, but when you’re driving onto your wireless charging pad, it’ll blink to let you know what’s going on. Or when you’re receiving a phone call or things like that, it’ll kind of blink to let you know what’s going on. These are all little things in which uh the LEDs are doing to become more useful and not just for aesthetic purposes. So, the LED strip new. Even the design of the power button on the left side, that’s new. Gauge cluster new. Screen new. So, this button layout is new. We have new cup holders. This center area right here is slightly different compared to a standard Cayenne. But generally speaking, they didn’t do too much to stray away from what we know and love about the Cayenne. From an overall vibes perspective, this very much feels like a Cayenne but electric. And I think that’s that’s what we want. Okay, firstly, let’s look at the trunk because I actually haven’t seen that yet in person. Have our hatchback open in here. And this is a decent amount of space. And obviously, you can fold the rear seats back if you want even more. But this is this is I think plenty. I could see myself stuffing a full set of wheels and tires back here for sure. I’m sure if you fold the seats down, you can get a bike back here. Pretty solid roominess in the back. This is actually better than I was expecting. Let’s see if there’s any additional storage down here. Just a little bit. So, this is where you would presumably keep like charging cables and whatnot, but honestly, not bad at all. Let’s take a look at the frunk cuz I’m actually very curious to see what roominess on that is like. And wow. Okay, so the first thing I’m noticing is that while there’s not a ton of space overall, it’s very deep. Like my hand is very far forward into this thing. Pretty much my whole arm is down in here. So, it’s it’s pretty deep, actually. So, this wouldn’t be big enough to fit something like a full carry-on suitcase. I think it’s just a little bit too small for that. And I’m not seeing any ways to remove this stuff right here. But, I mean, I think that’s solid. And I mean, that’s better than a lot of electric SUVs on sale which don’t even have a frunk. Like the Cadillac Vistic that we just reviewed or the Jeep Wagon Ear S that we just reviewed don’t have a frunk in the front. This is actually pretty solid all things considered. Well, then the magic question is how much are these new Porsche SUVs going to cost? Because let’s be honest, Porsches typically aren’t uh the cheapest or most valueoriented options. But, you know, if you’re cross shopping this against like a a Rivian R1S or even a Lucid Gravity, if it’s in the same price range, that makes sense. Is it in that price range or or if not, what other things are you crush hopping it with? Okay, time to get to the not so fun part. So, how much are these things going to cost? Well, it’s a Porsche, right? So, it’s not supposed to be the value option, but the base Kayen electric starts at a little over $100,000, almost $110. And then this one right here, the turbo electric, starts at almost $165,000 in the US. So, when comparing like the base Cayenne to other electric SUVs you can get on the market that aren’t performanceoriented, that’s where things become a little bit more competitive, unless you just have to have the Porsche badge, right? But I mean, honestly, when you consider how powerful this car is and how presumably well it’s going to drive, 163 compared to like a fully loaded Lucid Gravity or a fully loaded R1S. I mean, that’s not that’s not a terrible Porsche tax. Obviously, there’s a Porsche tax there, but it’s not the worst. Now, if they said this thing is starting at a quarter mil, well, okay, that’s that’s that’s a lot. But I mean, I think there’s objectively from a performance standpoint things that the Turbo Electric is going to be doing that things like the Lucid Gravity and the R1S simply will not. So, I mean, in some ways, I think the Turbo model is the more competitive car compared to its counterparts, more so than the base Cayenne Electric is competitive compared to everything else you can get in that price range. So, my last question, and maybe it’s the most important one, is, is there anything that you saw in this static walkound that would make you think that a currently gas car driving person would actually switch? Like maybe you were interested in the gas Cayenne. Is there anything you saw that would make you think that person might switch and go, “Okay, I’m going to get that electric Cayenne now.” Cuz that would be pretty sick. So obviously as the entire world makes the long road of transitioning into EVs from internal combustion engine cars, there’s going to be things that manufacturers are going to be doing to try to sweeten the deal in convincing people to transition to something like that Turbo GT over there into this Cayenne Turbo Electric. Although it’s good that you have both options, but what are we seeing here that’s actually making it a convincing argument to maybe switch from something like an Aston Martin DVX or a Lamborghini Urus or, you know, a Cayenne Turbo GT into something like this? Well, I mean, first things first, the power, right? There is simply no other SUV on sale that is going to hit 0 to 60 in 2.4 seconds. Even the Rivian R1S quad motor that you know we took to the dragstrip even though that was the R1T technically but more or less same car. That car was close but didn’t quite get that 2.4. Porsche says this hits 2.4 without roll out. And when Porsche says that that means it is true. You’re also going to have things available for this car like the active ride system which is something that debuted on the Panamera that gives you really excellent body control and makes the ride quality absolutely superb. And then things like wireless charging. I think that’s something that makes it a lot easier to not have to think about charging your car when you get home, even if you have a charger at home where you could literally just drive on and it’s more or less completely thoughtless. That’s something that I think definitely sweetens the deal. And theoretically, if you don’t commute a ton, I mean, you might never really have to go to a public charging station if you have something like this at home. So, I haven’t driven this car yet besides just driving it back and forth to put it on the wireless charging pad. So, I can’t say whether I would theoretically switch to something like this from a Cayenne Turbo GT, which I don’t own anyway. But, I mean, on paper, it’s looking it’s looking pretty good. And I mean, this is Porsche’s’s not first electric SUV, but it’s their first attempt at throwing everything uh at the kitchen sink and really providing a flagship Porsche SUV experience in electric form. Everything from the proposed propulsion numbers to the range. You got NACS active ride is going to be huge. Everything on paper looks pretty good. And so I guess we’ll have to find out if this ends up being the sum of its parts, more or less. But Porsche has my attention for sure. And so the next step will be getting this at the studio so we can drive it, review it, and really see if it lives up to what I am calling hype because I’m pretty excited to drive this car now. Now that I really got to take a look at it in person, the design doesn’t offend me a bunch. Um, it’s not my favorite looking Cayenne ever, but it’s far from the worst. Uh, but yeah, thanks to Porsche for letting me check this out a bit early, and uh, hopefully we’ll be driving this one soon. All right, I’ll talk to you guys in the next one.
The 2026 Porsche Cayenne Electric Turbo is packing a wallop of tech and performance features.
Shot on iPhone 17 Pro Max
Rode Wireless Micro: https://geni.us/FBnQh
