Porsche Taycan 4S – long-term review

Around 60 per cent of UK homes have off-street parking. Ours, unfortunately, is not one of them, which leaves me with three options when it comes to charging the Taycan.

1) Charge at work, except the Top Gear car park doesn’t have a charger… and I’ve been to the office once since last March.

2) Use public chargers, which is possible, but the nearest lamppost or 50kW charger is a 10 minute walk away and I’m incredibly lazy.

3) Charge at home, which is much more like it, and involves trailing a cable across the pavement then covering it with a sturdy rubber mat to avoid any expensive lawsuits from the neighbours.
 
With the Honda e this was easy – an extension cable to a standard three-pin plug filled it up overnight, but doing the same with the Taycan’s battery, which is almost three times bigger, would take the best part of two days. So, a wall box is required.

Enter Andersen, Porsche’s recommended purveyor of home charging points that don’t look like an old hose reel next to your front door.
 
They are not cheap. In fact, speccing one up is a much like configuring a Taycan, don’t pay attention and the bill can rack up fast. The 7kW box itself, with a metal cover, in a colour of your choice is £995, but for £140 more you can add an Accoya wood front. I swerved that and went with Stanton Green all over. If you’re a Farrow and Ball fan, you’ll love it.
 
A 5.5m cable comes as standard, but as I’d be stretching mine across the pavement I dropped an extra £80 on the longer 8.5m cord. The final addition was an adaptive fuse for £99, which monitors the electrical load on the whole house and turns down the charger if you’re getting close to blowing the roof off.

Oh yes, and £635 for a physical site survey and installation. Grand total (with the Government’s £350 OZEV grant deducted) £1,459 including VAT. Ouch.
 
But there are many reasons why I think it’s worth the money: it’s worked faultlessly since being plumbed in (always handy), it can charge the Taycan from zero to full overnight, it’s looks smart with the tethered cable tucked away out of sight, the app is easy to use and lets you put your electricity rate in to automatically cost up each charge, and the installation process was smooth from start to finish.

The tricky part is finding a route to run a wire from your fuse box to wherever you want it installed, without having to rip up your floor boards, which Andersen did with surprising care and attention.
 
Some of you might be alarmed at the thought of every pavement in Britain strewn with wires, and piles of people clutching their broken ankles as far as the eye can see… but that’s ridiculous. This is a system that works for me, but won’t work for all the other 40 per cent who don’t have a driveway, or live in an eighth floor flat.

There’s currently no law saying you can’t run a cable across the pavement, and my neighbours have been nothing but supportive and intrigued by my efforts to make owning an EV work. I often get a knock on the door if someone’s in the space directly outside, saying they’re happy to move if I need a charge. Who said Londoners were unfriendly?
 
Of course, sod’s law dictates that a week after the wall box was up and running, Lambeth council installed an Ubitricity point in the lamppost directly outside the house.

That was a request I made three times, six months ago, without any reply.

Oh well, good to have options.