2021 Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo to debut soon – nearly 1 mil test kilometres done; off-road capable!

The Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo is nearing the end of its final test phase, and it is well on track for market introduction in the next few months. According to the automaker, the Cross Turismo has completed a total of 998,361 kilometres of testing, which is enough zero-emissions mileage to circumnavigate the globe (at the equator) nearly 25 times.

The upcoming shooting brake has been on race tracks such as the Nürburgring Nordschleife, Hockenheim and Nardò race circuits, as well as on open roads in the south of France and the Pyrenees. Porsche also took the car off-road at its “Safari” track at the Weissach Development Centre.

Porsche model line vice president, Stefan Weckbach said: “When developing the Cross Turismo, we were of course able to build on our experience with the Taycan sports sedan. The biggest challenge was combining the requirements of sportiness with off-road capabilities.”

“The Cross Turismo has to be capable of high performance on the race track and must also be able to handle scree, mud and gravel.” These conditions were simulated at the same Weissach facility, and the result was impressive, Weckbach said. “However, the Cross Turismo is not a hardcore off-road vehicle, but specialises in unpaved and dirt roads. It’s like a type of Swiss army knife on up to 21-inch wheels,” he added.

Other tests include the customary extreme weather, laboratory and wind tunnel tests – Porsche spent a total of 325 hours to develop and validate the Cross Turismo’s aerodynamic design. This is on top of the 1,500 hours that went into the optimising the aero on the regular Taycan.

Among the Taycan Cross Turismo’s unique selling points is its added practicality. Porsche says there’s significantly more headroom for passengers in the rear, and the boot space is also much larger. In fact, Porsche even designed a new bicycle carrier for the Cross Turismo, and it went through its own rigorous testing programme with rough road tracks and driving dynamics tests.

In 2020, Porsche has sold over 20,000 units of the Taycan sedan, and in Norway the model accounts for 70% of all Porsche sales. Also, the rear-wheel drive Taycan is the current Guinness World Record holder for the longest drift ever done by an electric car. It drove sideways non-stop for 42.171 kilometres.

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