EX-F1 PILOT MARK WEBBER TACKLES TASMANIA WITH THE ALL-ELECTRIC PORSCHE TAYCAN
Mark Webber is no stranger to motorsport fanatics, the Australian racing driver competed in Formula 1 for 11 years and competed under Minardi, Jaguar, Williams, and Red Bull Racing. It makes sense then that he has fans worldwide, particularly in his home country Australia. He still dabbles in F1 as a commentator, and when you see him out and about he’s likely to be driving a Porsche seeing as he’s one of their brand ambassadors. Under that banner, Webber recently visited the Australian island of Tasmania where he got to put the all-electric Porsche Taycan through its paces. Tasmania is an island state separated from mainland Australia by the Bass Strait and is known for its rugged coastlines and pristine beaches with ancient rainforests inland. If you take note of the GPS coordinates that show on the screen for a few seconds at the start, they will direct you to a stretch of road known as Jacob’s Ladder. It’s an amazing road with different surfaces and it’s approximately 1.2 km in length long and has a gradient of between 20% and 37% and is in the middle of eight amazing corners on the Ben Lomond Road. The surrounding terrain looks like it’s not on this planet, and that makes for some stunning visuals, especially with one of the coolest fully-electric Porsche models you can buy today.
There are a few variants of the Taycan available, even though it was only released in 2021, and the version that Webber drives is the Porsche Taycan 4S Cross Turismo, an all-electric beast of a car that has changes to the regular version that make the car more suited to the Tasmanian terrain. The 4S Cross Turismo features a higher ride height along with a more rugged, off-road-inspired design that includes changes like flared wheel arches, a different front grille, protective body cladding that suits the off-the-tarmac, and roof rails that can serve as a mounting point for a roof rack for those lucky enough to be able to use the car for weekend camping exploits. In the world of EVs there are loads of cars that have ridiculous performance on tap and the Taycan is one of the best out there. The Taycan 4S Cross Turismo features a dual-motor all-wheel-drive system that’s rated at a very powerful 420 kW with a massive and typically-electric 650 Nm of torque. This level of power affords the Taycan 4S Cross Turismo the ability to launch from 0 - 100 km/h in as little as 3.9 seconds and has a top speed of 240 km/h. The 4S Cross Turismo is powered by an 800-volt battery pack that gives the EV a range of a claimed 365 kilometres on a single charge, so while the landscape looks to be in the middle of nowhere, it’s actually only around 50 kilometres from the town of Ouse, which is where the Porsche would have presumably received a full recharge before Webber used it to carve up the mountainous road. He could have done the pass a few times and still saved enough charge to make it back to the town, so that’s pretty much what you could do with an internal combustion engine. The arguments against EVs are looking more and more pointless.
Take a look at the YouTube video showing the all-electric Porsche Taycan carving up the roads in the amazing, rugged Tasmanian wilderness in an epically produced video: Wild performance: Mark Webber takes on Tasmania with the Porsche Taycan | Porsche
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