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Comment by eldenbishop | Hacker News Reader

From road and track: """At launch, Porsche will offer two versions of the Taycan—the Turbo and Turbo S. The Turbo will carry an MSRP of $153,510 at launch, while the Turbo S will cost $187,610. Both of those numbers are minus destination charge."""

I suppose that leaves room for a non-turbo (lol) Taycan closer to your prices sometime in the future.

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There are a number of lower trims coming. Plain taycan will be single motor, I believe they mentioned a 4S that will be the lowest dual motor option and a GTS, all below the turbo.

Porsche has been saying all along the base taycan will be right around the base panamara price, around 90K. Makes sense since taycan shares rear suspension and interior parts with panamara, and unlike other ICE cars where BEV raises costs, the cost of motor + battery is likely to be around the price of a porsche engine. Panamara turbo is 150K just like taycan turbo as well.

What's the turbo doing?

I (lol)ed because "turbo" and "turbo-s" are a naming convention from their conventional cars that is fairly non-sensical on an electric car given that they don't have turbochargers.

Eg. Macan < Macan S < Macan Turbo

Of course, the two non-turbo Macan models above both turbochargers so the moniker really just means "the fastest model" in Porsche speak.

The combustion non-turbo 911s also have turbochargers, so yes, long time marketing label, not feature description.

hilarious :)

Plus the GT2RS has a turbo but doesn't have a turbo trim. And the various GT3 cars don't have a turbo.

That’s more a marketing thing and emissions driving them to use small turbo 4 cylinders. Up until 2-3 years ago the bae 911 was naturally aspirated

> that is fairly non-sensical on an electric car given that they don't have turbochargers

Lots of things have had "turbo" terminology over the years.

- PCs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Turbo_Boost

- Video games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Fighter_II_Turbo%3A_Hyp...

- Folk music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo-folk

In areas where it didn't already mean a very specific feature. If I bought a sound card and it had "turbo boost" I would laugh pretty hard too! And if Intel started selling 'turbo' processors that couldn't turbo, that might even be bad enough to get lawsuits...

I’m surprised people are getting so pedantic about using the Turbo moniker on an electric car. Sure, historically in cars it has typically referred to a type of forced induction commonly used on combustion engines, but it’s also been generally used to mean “FAST” in virtually every other marketing field for decades. I love cars, regardless of the means by which they generate forward motion, and couldn’t care less Porsche called this one a Turbo - it’s performance characteristics are entirely in keeping with what one expects from a Porsche with the Turbo branding.

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