Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo Outback Drive

09/18/2023 05:00 PM

The Northern Territory has long been known as LandCruiser Country because the vehicle you needed to survive up here used to be a Toyota LandCruiser. The LandCruiser and similar vehicles like the Nissan Patrol boasted go-anywhere ability and bullet-proof reliability which took the stress out of venturing far beyond civilisation.  

These days, Australia's least populated and most naturally beautiful state is becoming known as Grey Nomad Country. 

Venture beyond the city limits of Darwin and every second car is a LandCruiser or a 4WD ute like a Toyota Hilux or Ford Ranger. Of those, close to half are being driven by adventurous retirees with six-figure caravans in tow, exploring the Great Outdoors on a carefree agenda with no end.

One type of car you don't see a lot up here is the electric vehicle, not even in Darwin. These post-oil primarily urban alternatives to petrol and diesel-powered cars are not built for the Outback. None of the EVs sold in Australia – yet – are built for life beyond the bitumen, or for towing. Limited driving ranges and long charging times compromise long-distance travel and force you to rely on an emerging and fragile infrastructure to recharge. 

So why has Porsche shipped two electric Taycan Turismo Cross 4S wagons – $237,613 driveaway in Melbourne – to Darwin for us to drive through the heart of the Northern Territory? Why have they flown their eMobility expert Mayk Weinkotter out from Germany to accompany the adventure, and why has Australian F1 race winner Mark Webber agreed to lead the convoy for the first two days?

Porsche's ambitions for this adventure stretch well beyond Drive's own finish line of Tennant Creek, 1000km south of Darwin on the Stuart Highway that connects our northernmost capital with Adelaide far to the south. After Tennant Creek, the convoy will turn southeast and wind its way through truly rugged terrain all the way to Bondi Beach in Sydney. 

All up it's a journey of more than 4000km, and as we discover on Day One, the Taycan Turismo Cross 4S has a real-world driving range of less than 400km on a full charge. 

That's a long way short of the WLTP claim of 512km. That also suggests that a fair chunk of the convoy's time will be spent waiting for the cars to recharge. Some of that can be done at night while tired drivers sleep, but that restricts each day to 400km at most – assuming there's a charger at waiting for you at km 399 each day. Otherwise, we'll need to drive shorter distances every day or top up throughout the day when the opportunity presents.

Day One is a good example of this with a first stage from Darwin's foreshore to Pine Creek 225km south. In a petrol car, that distance is less than a third of a tank. In the Porsches, sitting on the 130km/h speed limit, we use 70 per cent of the battery's charge. We arrive at the Pine Creek Hotel's 20kW AC charger at 11 a.m. so we plug one car in and grab an early lunch. Once that car's had an hour it heads off and we start charging the second car. 

After lunch I grab some wheeltime with Mr Webber, to find out what he's doing here, why Porsche is doing this, and how his Aussie F1 protege Oscar Piastri is handling a tumultuous first season at McLaren.

"He's establishing himself very well as a rookie in Formula 1. It’s so obviously extremely challenging to learn the new circuits, the new tyre compounds…putting all the weekends together. Ultimately, I think it’s been a phenomenal first part of the season for him. He’s done well. He’s learning a lot. I hope that the back end of the season is more of the same. 

"I don’t know that we should expect too much more. I think if he’s doing what he’s been doing up to this point, that’s highly impressive for a first season and he just keeps building on that in his first few years."

As for what we're doing out here in the Northern Territory in a Porsche EV, Mark has a view on that too. 

"Porsche has never been shy of doing this kind of stuff: taking their products into challenging environments. Look at the early days of the 959 and the Dakar experience around that and Jacky Ickx. Fast forward and Porsche just released the Dakar car, the 911. And obviously now with these EVs, we've seen that they can really be dependable and robust and have the range to get us through such a trip.

"Some other brands might find it intimidating but Porsche is happy to take on the challenge." 

Like me, Mark is surprised at how frequently we're finding charging stations. 

"It's pretty phenomenal, isn’t it? Obviously, you have to plan ahead and then you can just leapfrog your way down the road getting a top-up here and there where you can in around lunch or overnight. It’s a bit like a mobile phone. You wake up with a full charge ready to go. That’s been a pleasant surprise for us, all right."

As it turns out, we probably could have made our Day One destination of Katherine 317km on a single charge, but energy consumption at the highway's 130km/h speed limit was unknown. A short test during the second leg pegged this at 32kWh/100km. Given that the Porsche's 93.4kWh battery has a usable charge of 83.7kWh, our real-world range is 260km at best. 

At 110km/h the Taycan averages 27kWh/100km and at 90km/h the average is 23kWh/100km, so we did have the means to extend that driving range, but it would mean a longer journey time. On a short journey like our first day, what could be a 2.4-hour trip would blow out by almost 50 per cent to 3.5hr. But if you factor in the hour spent charging, they net out the same. 

We could also have employed the Taycan's specially programmed "Range" driving mode which increases the potential distance on a charge by limiting top speed, lowering the ride height, reducing headlight intensity and air conditioning effectiveness, and even turning off the passenger's digital display – all to conserve power. But that Pine Creek boost meant we didn't need to change our driving behaviour. 

Day Two's destination was Daly Waters, an Outback town that's overflowing with character. We had a couple of stops planned along the way, the first at Mataranka for a dip in the thermal springs and the second at Larrimah for lunch. Overall this would be a shorter day than the first with just 276km to cover. 

Again we took the opportunity to charge the cars while enjoying the 28-degree waters of Mataranka Springs, even though we'd only covered 120km. The two cars' departure times from Katherine had been staggered so each car could get an hour without delaying the convoy more than necessary. It meant an earlier rise for Car One's team that morning but once swimming finished we left in convoy for Larrimah.

Larrimah is an outback roadhouse and caravan park with plenty of character another 80km south. For some reason, the owners have adopted the Pink Panther as their mascot and there are more than a dozen of them all over the compound – including a larger-than-life statue sitting out front with a tinny and a second full-size Panther in an ultralight high over the car park.

There's also a crocodile basking in an enclosure, which I initially thought was fake until it batted an eyelid at me. 

We plugged the EVs in again… and promptly blew the fuse on the caravan park. Once that was reset the recharging resumed, again at 20kW AC, which was proving to be the Outback standard. 

After an Outback-sized steak sandwich, we continued on to Daly Waters, a town that makes Larrimah's concept of character look drab and underdone. 

The 90km cruise to Daly Waters proves uneventful. In fact, this whole trip is proving very uneventful from an automotive perspective. The cars are doing it easily, and there are enough charging points along the way that even a car with less than 250km EV range would not struggle. 

Daly Waters is not so much a town as a pub and a caravan park that has been given a massive tourist makeover. The main street is lined with really old rusted cars and trucks and busses and even old planes, parked by some long-ago patrons that simply never bothered to move them. 

The pub itself is typical of many outback pubs. The walls are covered with paraphernalia left by previous customers from all corners of the world. There are bank notes from dozens of countries, driver’s licences, hastily scribbled journey notes, hats, shirts and even bras hanging from the ceiling. 

The beer is cold and the food is huge. That, too, is something outback pubs have in common.

The next morning, Car One again leaves an hour early, heading for Tennant Creek. This promises to be our biggest day – 407km – so charging en route will be crucial. Our first stop is the tiny outpost of Elliott 150km from Daly Waters, again little more than a roadhouse and caravan park but it could have been so much more. 

Not far from Eliott is the huge cattle station of Newcastle Waters, once part owned by Kerry Packer who sent his son, James, there to work for a year. It's also the site of Sun Cable's proposed $30bn solar farm. When operational, this ambitious 12,000-hectare project would provide power to Darwin and – via a 3500km undersea cable – Singapore and Indonesia. 

What initially started as a joint venture between two of Australia's richest men, Mike Cannon Brookes and Andrew 'twiggy' Forrest who had invested a combined $210 million, stalled due to a fund-raising disagreement between the two. In January this year, Sun Cable went into voluntary administration.

If the project had got up, it's a fair bet that Elliott's EV-charging facility would be a bit nicer – and faster – than it is. To find it, you cross the road from the Roadhouse and look for the bright yellow concrete toilet block. Just behind that, next to the rubbish bins and under the clothesline is the 20kW AC charging point. 

It's not the most salubrious, but it charges the car and proves something of a deterrent for any would-be car thieves in the area. It's the last place anyone would think to park a Porsche.

As one of just two independent media on this journey – the other was Jörn Thomas from Germany's Auto Motor Und Sport magazine – we got the Pony Express treatment at Elliott. We had left Daly Waters in Car Two, two hours later than Car One. When we arrived at Elliott we swapped the EVs on charge and took Car One while the crew from Car One sat for another two hours.  

This 'swapping of horses' is a trick popularised in America's pioneering days to allow coach drivers to push their teams harder, knowing that a fresh team of horses awaited at the next stop. Urgent mail couriers used the same method, often jumping from one horse to another with barely a moment to rest themselves. 

For real Outback travellers, it's simply not an option. Who has a second EV waiting for them at every stop, recharged and ready to rock? It's a sleight of hand for sure, but for me, it doesn't undermine Porsche's overall goal of proving that EVs can be driven huge distances across the country. And to be honest, I don't know why they felt it necessary. I've done big drives in EVs. I don't mind waiting for a car to charge.

The leg from Elliott to Tennant Creek would be our biggest single leg without charging: 254km. Not an earth-shattering number, but still a decent test of the 4S's real range at a constant 130km/h with a few squirts beyond to overtake road trains and grey nomads.

Again, it passed without incident with not even a flat tyre or a wildlife close call to write about. Still, it gave me time to talk future with Mayk Weinkotter, Porsche's Taycan and eMobility spokesperson. I also learned that this was not Mayk's first Taycan adventure.

"At the beginning of the year, we took some Taycans to India and we drove from Mumbai to Hyderabad to watch the very first Formula E race in India where Porsche was quite successful. So, that was a good experience as well. We struggled with the charging infrastructure and making it work with the traffic, but it was a very good adventure. Very different from this scenery obviously, but also very extreme on the other hand.

"By comparison, I expected this trip to be harder but it's proving much easier than anticipated because I was not expecting to have so much power [availability] on the camping grounds where we were mainly charging. Plus having the option to charge overnight really made this trip much much easier than I anticipated."

Porsche is betting heavily on an EV future, but it's not an all-in bet. Synthetic fuels is another avenue Porsche is exploring, and applying to specific models in its range.

"It really depends on where in its lifecycle the model line is at the moment. If you have a completely new model line coming up, it’s more likely to be electric. But as you know, we also have the very iconic 911 and that’s supposed to be the last car that is going to be electrified. And for this model, we definitely are relying on e-fuels, which is also a very environmentally friendly and sustainable way of running this car for a long time."

I ask Mayk how he feels the enthusiast will respond to an electric 911. 

"Umm, I think by the time we do it – and if we ever do it – the technology will be so advanced, and EV will be the new normal, people will appreciate it. Doing it now for sure would not be the best and smartest idea to be fair. But by the time we eventually do it, the technologies will be much more advanced than they are today."

"We always claim that by 2030, 80 per cent of all new Porsches will be fully electric and that’s obviously not including the 911 model line. But SUVs like the Macan and the Cayenne are bigger vehicles, they are less sensitive to weight so they are more appropriate to electrify. 

"Next year, we’re going to present the fully electric Macan version which will be our second fully electric vehicle. Then we have the 718 model line in the pipeline. The next-generation Cayenne will be fully electric as well. We also planning to establish a new SUV even more luxurious than the Cayenne. The internal code is the K1 and this is also going to be fully electric."

Porsche has confirmed little about the K1 beyond its existence. We believe it will be a luxury seven-seater and it will join the range in 2027. You can read more here.

Mayk's chat concludes with our arrival into Tennant Creek, the end of Drive's involvement in this adventurous undertaking. So, after three days of driving 1000km through the Northern Territory, I now know the answer to: "Can you drive an EV through the Outback?"

The answer is yes, easily. As long as you stick to the main road and plan your charging points. And you're not in a hurry.

The more pertinent question is: "Would you choose to drive an EV through the Outback?" 

The answer is no. Because the daily range is limited, there's a lot of sitting around waiting to charge, it can't tow a caravan and it can't go far beyond the blacktop. 

As for range anxiety, out here it is very much an issue – for all cars. Knowing the location of your next recharge or refuel is key to survival. Sure, there's enough traffic on the Stuart that you'd never be stranded for more than five minutes, but if you turn off the blacktop then make sure you've done your homework.

An EV out here takes that to the next level. You need to be hyper-aware and have planned ahead, even on the Stuart highway. 

We did 1000km from Darwin to Tennant Creek in an EV in three days. For sightseers that pace is probably fast enough. For people who need to get where they're going, an EV wouldn't cut it out here.  

Not yet anyway.

One day, though, they'll be as common out here as grey nomads.

Porsche Cars Australia provided the cars and paid for all flights, accommodation and ground costs associated with this article.

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