Drifting is generally reserved for cars with massive power, rear wheel drive, and all the electronic goodies turned off.
So when Autocar decided to take a Porsche Taycan Turbo, itself in its entirety an “electronic goodie,” onto a skidpad to see if it would drift, a few eyebrows were raised.
For those not familiar with how to initiate a drift, it generally involves giving a car a gigantic kick of power to get the rear wheels loose. One then comes off the throttle to let the rear slide out, then balances counter-steering and throttle to catch the rear end and hang it out at obscene angles before straightening the steering up and pulling out of the drift.
Rear wheel drive supercars like the Ferrari 812 Superfast and Aston Martin V8 Vantage love to wiggle their rear ends about on a skid pad.
With the Taycan Turbo, you can break the rear out. However, once off the throttle, even with stability control off, the torque vectoring system thinks you want to go straight, and will shunt power forwards, pulling you out of the slide.
What Autocar discovers in their video is very counter-intuitive to how a normal car will drift. Instead of holding the slide with counter-steering, the “sweet spot,” the point in the steering where you can feel the car holding the slide, is actually turning into the slide very slightly.
Because torque and power with electric motors is instantaneous, there is no lag time between coming off the power and catching the slide while the engine power from an internal combustion engine wanes off. Once their driver understands that, the car does some pretty astounding donuts on the skid pad.
So, will a Porsche Taycan Turbo drift? Yes. Yes it will. But not in a way any other car drifts.
