 Is that a gray hair? Time to face facts. I'm not a young man anymore. It's time to stop acting like it. Yeah, you know what? I think I'm good. All of this, it really isn't me. But after spending the last month with the Porsche Taycan 4S, I can finally say I get why some people are into it. Believe it or not, I haven't gotten a lot of double takes in my life. So driving around in the Taycan made me feel cool in a way that I've just never gotten to experience before. Like, who wouldn't want to know something about the 30-something in a car that's worth more than a year of their salary, right? Add in the fact that this is the most fun I've ever had on four wheels, and the big question becomes, why did you just give the keys away? Truthfully, it's because everything from sitting behind the wheel to seeing it in my garage makes me feel like it's too good for me. But explaining why is going to take a little while. So have a seat. Today's video is brought to you by KiwiCo. KiwiCo ships out crates that contain hands-on projects for kids to help develop their creative confidence and problem-solving skills. Learn more at the end of this video or at the link down below. Walking into a Porsche dealership is the most emotional experience that I've ever had shopping for a car, starting with overwhelming confusion. The Taycan is billed as the most customizable Porsche yet, with 90 options to configure. And while the representative did try to guide me through the experience, most of the stuff is honestly better explained through Porsche forum posts. And of the $40,000 worth of options on this car, some, like the larger battery, are totally worth it, while others feel more than a bit excessive. Then I went on the test drive, and boy did that ever stir up some different emotions. Just so it's clear to everyone, your head don't care about cars at all, you all need to stop comparing Teslas to Porsches. One feels like operating a giant RC car, and the other one, the other one feels like driving. According to Porsche, the 4S model makes 482 horsepower and 479 foot pounds of torque. Feels pretty good to me. But this is really fun, Stratified Automotive, who happens to be not only a YouTube channel, but also our neighbor in the complex we work in, came over, they saw this thing in the parking lot, and they were like, Hey guys, we would love to throw that on the dyno. And we found out some really interesting things. Number one is that Porsche is actually overselling the horsepower on this particular model to the tune of about 50 horsepower. But we weren't too salty about it, because the reality of it is, it mostly comes down to torque. If you want to talk about how peppy the car feels, and it turns out it actually has 184 more foot pounds of torque than Porsche rated it for. They are seriously underselling the kick of this thing. Sorry guys, your heads okay? Get a concussion over there. I really cannot overstate how much pull this thing has. So foot on the brake, foot on the gas, that puts you in launch control. And all we got to do is release the brake. You guys ready? Brandon, get your head against the head of the... There we go! Zero to 60 in 3.8 seconds. And that's it. That's about as much fun as you're going to have on an actual road. The suspension in this thing too is just unbelievable. Somehow it manages to smooth out even the bumpiest roads, while also feeling firmly planted. And I guess you could kind of call it a downside, but one of the effects of that is that doing 100-120 down the freeway feels like 10 in a parking lot. It just really is an otherworldly driving experience. Just make sure you keep control of your lead foot, because especially in this color, I don't think you're getting off with a warning. When you're at a track and allowed to push past what you're legally able to on the roads though, oh my god, this thing is fun. So in like normal and sport modes, you push on and you get a bit of understeer. It's pretty good, but now I'm going to chuck it into sport plus. We have traction control totally off. Bring her into this corner here. Nice and balanced. Then on the gas. Oh my god, you can do big slides. Holy crap. Now, what makes us different than a normal car? Well, in most cars you get what's a McPherson strut suspension. So that's, you know, shock on top of the bearing carrier, whereas in this thing right here, you have a double A-arm suspension. So you're able to have much better control of how the tire hits the road during the whole travel. Now, just handling on the track isn't the hardest thing to do. What's difficult is to have great handling on the track while also not destroying your back on the road. Now, Porsche has two things that allow you to do this. The first is an air suspension. So that allows you to raise it up to go over bumps and drop it right down low for, you know, track use like this. But what I like even more is the adaptive dampers. So dampers resist changes in speed of the suspension. So without them, you know, you just start bouncing up and down. And how they work is that oil is forced through a bunch of little holes. Now, by changing the size of those holes, you're able to change how much it damps to take it from, you know, able to do. Oh, that until, you know, making them a little bit bigger so that it's nice to have on the road. In my opinion, that should be on every single car that's above like $30,000. Now, as fun as this is, there's a lot wrong with this and pretty much all of it has to do with the tech. Although I want to do one more drift. Everything about the Taycan's interior is laid out logically. At least, I assume that's the case. If so, it must be some kind of higher German logic because my misadventures with the controls and infotainment system started with not being able to turn off the heated steering wheel during my test drive and basically went downhill from there. My eight-year-old son suggested tapping the steering wheel in the ventilation configuration menu, which I honestly thought was a pretty good idea, but that didn't do it. So we resolved to just ask when we got back to the dealer. Turns out it's down here. The learning curve on this thing is steep, even after you read the owner's manual. But then even after that, there are a bunch of really annoying things that automakers have had figured out for decades that somehow got broken when they translated them to a touchscreen. Every time the car is turned on, for example, the driving mode gets reset to normal and regenerative braking gets turned off. Why wouldn't it just be exactly how I set it up the last time I was driving, especially because you have an individualized driving mode? And who at Porsche thought that this climate control screen was better than physical knobs? Changing the temperature takes forever. You should be able to just swipe this to go in larger increments. Also, you can't physically control the vents. They're done on the touchscreen, which would be mostly fine. Tesla does it. But every time you change where the vents are facing, it resets the fan speed to auto again. Why? Possibly the most egregious thing, though, is the display dimming at night, where you have to go deep into the menus and find the brightness setting, adjust it, and then go back and do the same thing for every single display. It's a really good thing the adaptive cruise and lane keep are excellent, because that's a lot of distracted driving. So much of it just feels half baked, like kind of like the engineers tested this thing on the track went, man, this is fun to drive, and then called it a day. I mean, even Bluetooth audio is subpar. Pairing your phone is fine, but this is just about the clunkiest media control experience that I have ever had built into a car. Repeat song outright didn't work for me at all. And why does the first second of my song cut off when I go back a track? I can literally buy a $20 dongle on eBay that doesn't have that problem. Now, a fair few of these things could easily be solved by simply plugging in a type C cable and using Android Auto. Could, except that the Taycan only has CarPlay, which is why I had to daily drive an iPhone while I was doing this review. And if you don't happen to have an iPhone that you can just switch to when you're driving your Porsche, you're just going to have a terrible time. Now, I remember being warned on Twitter to make sure that I evaluate this car in the proper context. It's focused on driving, they said. Okay. But here's a question for you. Is listening to music not an integral part of driving? The Bose speaker system sounds great. So clearly Porsche thought it was. What about being able to quickly and easily navigate menus with a responsive touchscreen? Is that integral to driving? Tesla thinks so. I mean, heck, even Volkswagen, Porsche's parent company can do it on a car that is five times cheaper. And what is this? If I click on phone for someone with only one number, it will prompt me for which thing to call, including email. What am I going to do with email from behind the wheel of a car? I'm sorry. Porsche apologists. There is only one word to describe this kind of deficiency in a vehicle that costs this much. Excuse. If the infotainment is an integral part of the driving experience, then it should be good. And if it isn't, then maybe it just shouldn't have one. Seriously, I think this would actually be a better car if three of these displays were gone. For all of my grapes, though, there were a lot of things about this car that were just on a completely different level. As I mentioned before, the adaptive cruise control, it's awesome. I was finally able to use this feature without my wife feeling nauseated by the jerky stopping and starting like she was in the Model Y. And since I'm making that comparison, having proper windshield wiper controls is something I never thought I'd have to give out a gold star for until I used Tesla's horrible touchscreen ones. Not that I even needed them here anyway, since Porsche's rain sensors were way better, too. The parking camera can be configured in a number of ways to suit your style, and it automatically engages when you approach a parking spot at low speed. It's pretty nice. The seat comfort and adjustments were beyond anything I have ever experienced in my life. And again, the ride quality. What I find hilarious about the tech line that's like the Taycan, the adaptive cruise control, auto wipers, parking sensors, as far as I can tell, it's exactly what's in my Golf GTI. What my Golf doesn't have, though, is crippling range anxiety. Porsche have done so much to extend the range of this thing from the flaps that close when the radiators aren't needed. These vents here that create a curtain of air around the tires to help reduce drag and just the overall shape, which isn't just beautiful, but slices through the air so well. But maybe it's just the weight of my right foot. I found I was going through the charge surprisingly fast, although Porsche thought of a solution to that, too. Seven hundred and twenty three volt fast charging and when it works, it's amazing. There's a charger in a park near my house. So I go walk the dog, come back full charge. And it's for a fraction of what a tank of gas would cost when it works. Only two of the seven fast charges I've tried actually worked. Two are actually so charges to are broken and one just straight up didn't exist anymore. I almost got stranded last night after three in a row were broken. This is in Vancouver. I thought the charging network was pretty good here. Apparently, Tesla's superchargers are solid, but they won't let me use them due to billing problems. Yes, sure, Ilhan. For my part, though, I can see the below average range being a disappointment for some buyers. But as someone who's not into road tripping and who has a charger in my garage, I don't foresee any point in the future that that would be a problem. Like 300 miles is more than enough for your daily commute and enough for the vast majority of your Sunday adventures, which will be mind blowing, by the way. The Taycan, more than any other electric car yet, gets me excited about the future and the advancements that we're about to see. It proves to me that electric cars can be fun and engaging in a way that Tesla's just aren't. But while the car-ness is great, as a tech enthusiast, I think it's fair to say that Porsche still has some homework to do. Things like the charging network, those will almost certainly improve. But the infotainment system is a big question mark for me about this vehicle. Common Sense would dictate that they can fix that through updates. It's just software. But that assumes that the team has both the drive and the leadership to improve it, and that there's a desire from Porsche to look after these early adopters instead of just fixing it in the next model year facelift and leaving this one to depreciate hard. If I had 160 grand to spend, should I roll these dice then or just keep waiting? And for me, the bigger question is, why should I take part in this experiment when the GT3 exists? It seems like Porsche have landed on the perfect internal combustion engine, and with emission regulations getting tougher and tougher, who knows how much longer they'll be able to make it. It'd be a shame to miss out on that, though the plus side of this experience is that when they do kill the flat six, what's coming around the corner will not disappoint. That means you don't have to run off to the store to get extra supplies like glue or glitter or whatever else. The crate we have here is that Kiwi level for kids ages five to eight that teaches programming and robotics. And another one is the Eureka level for your teens ages 14 plus that help highlight basic engineering and sound practices. KiwiCo is a great way to keep your kids occupied for hours. And you, if I'm being honest, because you'll have more fun if you do it with them. And if you check it out today at KiwiCo.com slash Linus, you'll get your first month free. Thanks for watching guys. If you enjoyed this video, go check out our Tesla Model Y video. I'd say that's probably worth seeing the comparison. They're so different. It's like one of them's a rolling infotainment system and the other one's a car.