Categories
Car Factories News Porsche Tesla

Elon Musk slams Porsche for using the term ‘Turbo’ in Taycan, Porsche CEO hints at financial troubles

Elon Musk asks Porsche on why they have used the word ‘Turbo’ when naming their first-ever EV the ‘Taycan’. Porsche CEO hints at possible financial issues.

   Author Photo: Iqtidar Aliby Iqtidar Ali | @IqtidarAlii

Tesla CEO Elon Musk poked Porsche on twitter yesterday by reminding them that the word ‘Turbo’ does not fit in the electric vehicle universe and the German automaker is using it wrongfully for their recently launched Taycan EV.

Instead of someone replying from Porsche, the official account of ‘Jalopnik (an auto enthusiast website mainly focusing the polluting ICE vehicles)’ tried to slam Elon Musk of using the term ‘Autopilot’ for Tesla’s driver assistance system, but Elon is Elon, Jalopnik had to face shame after that, here’s the string of tweets between the two.

Explainthatstuff.com digs deep and tells us how the phenomenon of a turbocharger or turbo works in an internal combustion engine vehicle:

The turbocharger on a car applies a very similar principle to a piston engine. It uses the exhaust gas to drive a turbine. This spins an air compressor that pushes extra air (and oxygen) into the cylinders, allowing them to burn more fuel each second. That’s why a turbocharged car can produce more power (which is another way of saying “more energy per second”).

Since there is no engine, not turbine and not exhaust pipe in a battery-powered electric vehicle of any sort, the ‘turbo’ thing does not apply to the Porsche Taycan but it might have been named like this to retain old Porsche customers who are used to the term in their ICE sports cars like the 911 Turbo etc.

On the other hand, Porsche CEO Oliver Blume hinted at the troubling financial situation at the company when talking to Bloomberg about the Taycan EV project (previously called the ‘Mission-E’) — he told Bloomberg that the Porsche employees sacrificed their future raises for the Taycan project to be viable.

At the Porsche Taycan World Premier earlier this week, Porsche announced that the company will be making an investment of about 6 billion euros to create an entire electric vehicle lineup if they have this sort of financial capacity, why would they pause employee raises? Sounds weird!

On the other hand the entire world is comparing the Porsche Taycan with Tesla vehicles, from the Model 3 Performance to Model S P100D and everything in between, but the German performance EV seems to be missing on key points.

As in the following chart, the Taycan Turbo is compared to the Tesla Model S for efficiency, 0-60 performance, range, charging speed and price (MSRP) and the winner in all these disciplines is the Model S P100D with a considerably lower starting price i.e. $99,000 vs. the Taycan’s $150,000+.

Tesla Model S P100D vs. Porsche Taycan Turbo – key metrics comparison graph by ARK Invest.
Tesla Model 3 Interior Vinyl Kit

Follow us on Google News Click to folow us on Google News

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *