Thank Frankel it’s Friday: Can the Porsche Taycan be a true sportscar?

As a journalist you always have to be careful with these ride along stories, so that you don’t end up crediting the car with incredible abilities when in fact that’s just how the highly skilled professional test driver behind the wheel had been able to make it feel. Even so, the fact the all-electric Taycan has the lowest centre of gravity of any Porsche on sale and the fastest reacting four-wheel drive system lends credence to the contention of its chief test driver that on the limit it’s the most easily controllable Porsche of them all. Repeated high speed recoveries from near ninety degree slip angles on ice didn’t harm his claim either.

But is it a sportscar? Indeed can an electric car ever be considered as a true sportscar? Of that I’m still not sure. Of course the Taycan is not trying to be a sportscar in any traditional sense. It’s got four doors and five seats, and while its driving position and interior ambience are closer to that of a 911 than a Panamera, this is a car aimed to work as practical transport first and a sporting driver’s car second.

And the distinction between a sportscar and one that is merely sporting is critical. A BMW M5 is a distinctly sporting car, you might even say the same of a Porsche Cayenne Turbo, but no-one would call either of them a sportscar.

So what is a sportscar? I guess you could call any car with two doors and two seats a sportscar in concept, but it needs to do rather more than that otherwise a Suzuki X90 would qualify, and we can’t have that.

A sportscar is a car whose primary focus is the provision of driving pleasure to its driver, not the accommodation of his or her family, or long-distance comfort or anything else. It must be car for driving and drivers. The kind of car that makes you want to set an alarm at 3:00am because you know the roads will be quiet. The car that makes you take the long way home even when you’re tired, just because you can. Loads of cars qualify at all price points from a second hand one grand Mazda MX-5 to a £15 million McLaren F1.

But is anyone ever going to set an alarm for an electric car? Right now it’s a little hard to see. And to understand why, we need to take a look at what it is that makes us want to drive cars in the first place.

It’s not about raw performance as our MX-5 shows so clearly, nor is it about the ability to generate cheek rippling grip. One of the reasons I’m so fond of the Toyota GT-86 is because it doesn’t require you to be on a race track before you can gently nudge up against its adhesion limits.

It is partly about how accurately it executes your instructions and how immediately, and here I see no bar to an electric car being a sportscar. But it is also undoubtedly about lightness. A two tonne Bugatti Chiron might be a supercar or even a hypercar but a sportscar? Not in my book. And electric cars are heavy: even the quite diminutive Taycan is going to come in at around 2.2 tonnes, or approximately double the weight of signed up sportscar like an Alpine A110. But that’s not all.

A sportscar has to do more than impress with its ability: it has to engage you on an entirely subjective level too, which means tuning into your senses. It has to sound right, and few things are more appealing to the enthusiast’s ear than the rising and falling voice of that exquisite mechanical instrument we call the well-tuned internal combustion engine. It has to interact with us too, not just through the steering but by letting us do things like change gear with either stick or paddle. And electric cars don’t do that either.

I’m probably wrong. There are right now thousands of engineers, all far smarter than me, working in laboratories around the world to figure out how to turn an electric car into something we want to drive purely for the hell of it. But they’ve not managed it yet. When they do, I’ll come back on here and eat these words with pleasure.