JMRCAR 
The new Turbo GT and its Weissach version are peak Taycan, but the 4S may be the most tantalizing model for real-world roads.
Five years on, the Porsche Taycan still stands out among EVs—not just for its looks, but for what it delivers to the dr
iver. It’s one of the few that doesn’t dull or distort the inputs, or forgo a joyful driving experience, to deliver top-tier performance numbers.
As we were reminded recently, with much of the 2025 Porsche Taycan lineup assembled to be sampled one after another on Car and Driver‘s main evaluation route, if you don’t have the track time or the budget for the latest-and-greatest 1019-hp Taycan Turbo GT, which costs $231,995 to start, the 4S might just be the ideal Taycan for public roads.
Why? As C/D tested it, the Taycan 4S is one of the few electric vehicles that doesn’t drive as if it were burdened with 1000 more pounds than intended or signal a series of chassis-tech band-aids in certain dynamic situations. It’s a willing dance partner on back roads, with nearly all the right feedback and the sensations you might expect from a sports car.
The 2025 Taycan 4S, with its optional larger Performance Battery Plus (97 kWh versus the standard 82), is no lightweight at 5143 pounds. Yet there’s a new secret sauce that erases perceived mass and makes this model click even more cohesively than the previous one. Beyond the adaptive two-chamber air suspension that all Taycan’s now use, Porsche has upped its chassis tuning with the optional Active Ride system. This does away with anti-roll bars, harnessing two-valve hydraulic damper tech that can react quickly and precisely at all four corners.
The result, as we observed on the choppy, uneven surfaces of our Michigan drive loop, goes beyond improving the ride and expands the envelope of dynamic grip. It can essentially push each wheel downward or pull it upward to build normal, natural cornering forces and an intuitive sense of body control. The trick technology heightens the experience all around. Multiple drivers from our persnickety bunch praised the Taycan 4S’s ride-and-handling balance.
There’s nothing simple about Active Ride, other than it’s simply a must-have on the Taycan. It’s a $7140 option on our 2025 test car (and goes up to $7390 for the 2026 model year). It isn’t offered on the base Taycan or the new Taycan 4. So with the 4S serving as the entry point for this remarkable technology, it’s the Taycan we’d recommend.
HIGHS: Active Ride counters EV ballast, superb seats and driving position, charges even faster than before.
Our test car, in luminous Ice Grey Metallic, was also optioned with 21-inch wheels and a long list of smart performance upgrades tacked onto its $120,495 base price. Those included the $3260 Performance package, which brings Porsche’s Torque Vectoring Plus system, rear-axle steering, aluminum pedals, and the Sport Chrono package. Soft-close doors and a head-up display were there as part of the $6900 Premium package, and an $1130 upgrade brought thermal- and noise-insulated windows in addition to various other extras that pushed the total to $154,685.
Back to the straight-line stuff: In 4S form, the Taycan delivers a baseline 509 horsepower and 490 pound-feet of torque, and with launch control engaged, that ramps up to 590 horses and 523 pound-feet. In our testing, that was good for a sprint to 60 mph in 3.1 seconds—0.4 second quicker than Porsche’s official time and a full second quicker than the rear-wheel-drive 2025 base Taycan we tested last year. The trip to 100 mph takes only 7.2 seconds.
Thanks to its two-speed gearbox for the rear motor, the 4S and other Taycan’s don’t run out of electric breath in the triple digits. The 4S did the quarter-mile in 11.2 seconds at 125 mph. Granted, it can’t match the brutality of the Lucid Air Sapphire, with its 2.1-second run to 60 mph and 9.3-second-at-153-mph quarter-mile, or the Taycan Turbo GT Weissach, which does a 1.9-second 60-mph dash and a 9.2-at-152 pass of the quarter-mile. But get real: Three seconds to 60 is absolutely a pin-you-back launch.
The Taycan still doesn’t offer a one-pedal driving mode, and Porsche insists that you should glide for the best efficiency and dab the brakes to slow. We get it. But with most of the deceleration in light to moderate situations happening via regenerative braking through the motors, it results in some fussy behavior where the bite of the pads isn’t entirely connected to pedal pressure. The car puts up some impressive stops, though, coming to a halt from 70 mph in just 151 feet and from 100 mph in a fade-free 306 feet.
LOWS: Brake feel, back-seat usability, breathtaking out-the-door prices.
Our 4S was also the first vehicle we’ve tested with Hankook’s flagship eco-performance tire, the Ion Evo, which is claimed to be made of 45 percent sustainable raw materials and provides reduced rolling resistance. It’s been newly added as one of Porsche’s OEM offerings and proved to be a quiet and willing fitment.
Porsche hasn’t messed with the Taycan’s good looks, outside of a refresh of cabin trims and revamped lighting outside along with some ever-so-slight front and rear detail tweaks. Beneath that though, Porsche has managed a lengthy list of mid-cycle improvements to the underpinnings, ranging from new thermal management to aero and rolling-resistance tweaks. And, most notably, there’s a bigger battery pack that delivers lots more range: While the 2024 and earlier Taycan with the largest Performance Battery Plus totaled 84 kWh, it now amounts to 97 kWh with the use of more energy-dense cells. The EPA rates the 4S sedan at 295 miles of range on 21-inch wheels, but if you can stick with the base 19-inchers, the car is good for 315 miles—quite an advantage over the Turbo GT’s 276 miles.
On our 75-mph highway range test, the 4S equipped with the Performance Battery Plus traveled 330 miles on a charge, beating the EPA’s estimate and crushing the 220 miles we observed in a 2020 Taycan 4S with the large battery.
The original Taycan led a charge to 800-volt architectures and especially short charge times. Despite the larger battery pack for 2025, Porsche is making use of a new 320-kW peak charging power (still via a CCS port) and claiming an even quicker 10 to 80 percent charge time of as little as 18 minutes, versus the previous 22-or-so minutes. It’s also allowing the cells to be charged at their peak rate at a wider temperature range, which should mean owners see the quickest charging stops more often. The Taycan doesn’t split its pack into two for 400-volt charging like the Macan Electric and its PPE platform, but it makes use of a charge pump device to boost what it can get from 400-volt hardware like the most common V3 Tesla Superchargers. We’ll report back when we have the time to fully measure the 4S’s electron draw in the real world.
As before, you can plug a J1772 AC connector into the Taycan on either side (with charge ports just ahead of the front doors), while DC fast-charging via the CCS port is only on the passenger’s side. An 11.0-kW onboard charger means that a full overnight charge is in reach for most owners with 240-volt home hardware.
VERDICT: The Goldilocks of electric Porsches.
Some of us do find the Taycan’s interface smoother and more intuitive than the newer Android-based interface in the Macan Electric. But there are certain drawbacks of this physical Taycan sedan package that haven’t changed one bit, namely that its back seat is, as one comment aptly put it, is “borderline useless.” If that’s an issue, there’s always the wagon-like Cross Turismo body style, which offers a bit more headroom in back. Consider it a slightly bigger bowl for Porsche’s just-right porridge.
