Electric car drag races are frequently superficial. A car that has a lot of power moves quickly. Almost every EV drag race goes like that. Because electric motors put out nearly all their power and torque speedily and don’t need a powerband or gears, the one with the most power usually wins a drag race. This one from Carwow is strange because it shows the Lucid Air and the Porsche Taycan Turbo S. It shows that EVs can act in many different ways and that each one has a unique personality. Performance EVs are also criticized for not being very different from each other. All electric engines and the power they make go through the same thing. But Porsche’s Taycan has shown that they don’t have to do that. The Porsche Taycan Turbo is different from other electric sports cars because it has a two-speed gearbox on the rear axle and carbon ceramic brakes with ten-piston calipers. This drag race is much more interesting than initially seemed because of these two things. Based on the math, the Taycan should lose to the Lucid Air Dream Edition. It has 1,111 horsepower and 1,025 pound-feet of torque from its two motors, while the Taycan Turbo S only has 750 horsepower and 774 pound-feet of torque. The Lucid weighs a few pounds more, but only by a few. This gives it a significant power-to-weight edge, and you might think it would beat the Porsche immediately. Do you remember that the Porsche only had two speeds? Porsche made a great choice when it put a two-speed gearbox on the Taycan’s back axle. This gives the car a low gear for starting and a high gear for going as fast as possible. In this drag race, the former made the Taycan take off like a rocket, quickly passing the much more powerful Lucid. At the end of the quarter-mile, the Lucid was faster than the Porsche, even though the Porsche was faster, up to about 60 mph. In the real world, people who own a Taycan Turbo S will win stop-and-go speed races against people who own a Lucid. The Porsche stands out from cars like the Lucid and the Tesla by being slower overall and slower at high speeds. This shows that EVs could be a big part of an exciting future for cars.
