Need a boat? Attach an outboard motor to a Taycan and set sail for high seas (not really.)
Push a car into the ocean mafia style and, thanks to cars not being 100 percent watertight, they’ll quickly sink to the ocean floor.
Well, with the Porsche Taycan that’s not entirely true.
The Smoking Tire’s Matt Farah was recently on Spike’s Car Radio and towards the end of the show Farah recounted a bittersweet story of how several Taycans didn’t suffer flood damage when Hurricane Ida swept through his friend’s Porsche dealership.
Thanks to Porsche’s impeccable build quality, not a drop of water penetrated any of the Taycan’s interior. Instead, all that trapped interior air, much less dense than water, enabled each Taycan to float.
Here’s what Farah said verbatim. Link to the podcast is here and his segment starts at 50:40.
“My friend owns a Porsche dealership, Town Motors in Englewood, NJ. Family owned for 50 years.
They just had those awful floods, right. Hurricane Ida. So they lost 25 cars from their inventory, they got flooded out, which is terrible.
But, interestingly, the Taycans. The Taycans cabins are completely sealed and they float.
So, the Taycans were damaged not because water damaged the interior but because they floated and smashed into other things.
The Taycans floated!”
Since cars aren’t meant to be submerged in water, take a bog-standard Honda Civic off the lot and there will be places where water can seep in.
Water soon seeps in from under the engine, nosediving a car as water rushes over the hood, into fresh air vents, and ultimately flooding your cabin.
Electric cars are, mostly, flat-bottomed from bumper to bumper.
Since a Taycan’s batteries and motors are liquid-cooled, there’s no need to route air from underneath. Instead, the bottom is sealed from end to end for aerodynamics and moisture protection.
Still gotta drive in rain, right?
While all cars have exhausters (or rubber flaps) on the outside, these are one-way flaps that let air out (to relieve in-cabin pressure) and should theoretically keep air and water from coming in.
Add in Porsche’s impeccable build quality and you end up with a Taycan where, given rising water, will float, not letting any water in.
I wonder if this is something that happens to most flat-bottomed EVs (looking at you Tesla.)
Given the reputation for build quality of Porsche’s main EV competitor at the moment, I highly doubt that.
