Porsche Taycan
Published · Researched 2026-09-21
Porsche Taycan (2021–2026) — honest review
Voice: straight-talking forum veteran, sharper and faster-paced this time; someone who's watched the battery saga unfold in real time on TaycanForum.
Nobody disputes the Taycan is the best-driving EV you can buy. The question is whether you want to own the battery that comes with it — and the answer depends entirely on which model year you're looking at.
The Taycan is Porsche's electric sports sedan, 800-volt architecture, available as a sedan, Cross Turismo wagon, and Sport Turismo. The 2020–2024 cars are the first generation; 2025 brought a heavy facelift with a bigger 105 kWh battery, 320 kW charging, and up to 938 horsepower in the Turbo S. New ones run from just over $100,000 to roughly $232,000, which is real money for a car with this much baggage in its past.
What's genuinely good: the drive. Owners call it "a precision driving instrument," and they're not wrong — steering feel, body control, and balance are in a different league from a Model S or an EQE. The facelift fixed the car's two original sins. Range went from a mediocre 199–246 EPA miles to over 300 real-world miles — Tom Moloughney got 302 miles at 70 mph in a Cross Turismo on winter tires, beating the EPA rating by 9%, and UK testers report 400+ motorway miles from the base rear-drive car in good weather. Charging is genuinely elite: 320 kW peak, 10–80% in about 18 minutes, and Porsche's range estimator is famously honest — "Porsche's range readouts do not lie," as one tester put it, in a pointed contrast with Tesla's optimism. Owners rate the cars 5/5 on CarGurus. If your life runs along corridors with working 800V chargers, the facelift Taycan is close to the complete EV.
What's actually wrong: the battery saga, and it's not internet folklore — it's a federal class action. Owners of 2020–2024 Taycans sued alleging the high-voltage battery modules can short-circuit and catch fire; Porsche has issued three recalls, and in September 2026 a judge refused to kill the case, so it proceeds. The interim remedy tells the story: charge to 80% max. On a car whose original range was already the weak point, losing a fifth of it to a safety cap is brutal. Full remedy — module replacement — has run on a "wait and see and we'll let you know" timeline, per owners quoting their own recall notices. One Florida owner's car sat at the dealer for testing, PCNA floated a buyback, then emailed that the car "didn't qualify," then declined the battery replacement: "We'll now have a very expensive fire hazard." Beyond the fire-risk modules: repeated high-voltage heater failures (one owner on his third at 41,000 miles, two weeks per repair), 12V battery drain, software glitches that brick the car with "electrical system error" — one owner lost his car for three months waiting on a battery from Germany while paying the lease. A Threads poster heard of a €50,000 out-of-warranty battery bill. And then there's depreciation, the quiet killer: 2021 cars that stickered over $103,000 now average $68,500 used. European owners on TaycanForum connect the dots explicitly — the battery saga is what's crushing residuals.
The social pulse: TaycanForum is the angriest, most detailed owner community in this whole project, and it's also where the love lives. Threads swing between "best car I've ever driven" and "join the class action." Nobody's faking it — the complaints come with invoice photos and NHTSA ID numbers. The 2025 facelift got a genuine wave of enthusiasm (@edmundscars, 124 likes: "a whole lot more punch in both performance and range"), but old hands keep asking whether the new chemistry is really clean. Fair question; long-term data doesn't exist yet.
Value call: never buy a new Taycan unless money is decorative. The depreciation curve is a cliff — a 2021 at $68.5k or a 2022 at $70k is half the price of new for 90% of the driving experience, but only if the battery modules have been replaced under recall and you get a battery health report in writing. The sweet spot is the 2025 facelift: new 105 kWh pack, 320 kW charging, 300+ real-world miles, and it sits outside the 2020–2024 recall cohort. Expect to pay $100k+ new or wait for used facelift cars to appear. Skip 2020–2021 entirely — earliest batteries, heaviest recall exposure, heater and 12V gremlins. Cross-shop the Audi RS e-tron GT (same bones, less drama tax), the Lucid Air (more range, less soul), and the Model S Plaid (faster, cheaper, worse at being a Porsche).
The honest tradeoff: the finest-driving EV on sale, stapled to the most stressful battery story in the industry. Buy the facelift, verify the battery, and let someone else take the depreciation.