Hennessey amps up the Porsche Taycan

The Porsche Taycan is concussively rapid. I know this because I almost knocked myself unconscious when travelling in the back of one when the driver planted the throttle.

After seeing stars for a while, I came to the conclusion that you really don’t need a Taycan Turbo S to go any faster. It’s been independently timed at 2.6 seconds to 100km/h which seems fast enough for most.

They think differently in Texas.

Perhaps time folds upon itself somewhere in the region of Sealy TX 77474, where Hennessey Performance Engineering is based. The locals talk slowly, like a long lunch, but clearly feel that 2.6 seconds represents some sort of eternity.

That’s why Hennessey has made its plans clear: the Porsche Taycan will be its first EV project.

Talk about jumping in at the deep end. A Taycan stripped back to its bones is a fearsomely complex piece of electronic wizardry. Perhaps HPE boss John Hennessey saw the Turbo badge on the back and got on the phone to Garrett and ordered up a container of their biggest snails.

Jokes aside, it’ll be interesting to see how the company moves into an entirely new phase in its development.

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“We’ve been planning to do something with electrified vehicles for a while now,” says John Hennessey. “We felt that the new Porsche Taycan was the right platform from which to modify our first EV.”

First deliveries of the Taycan will be made in mid-2020 and the initial round of upgrades will be purely cosmetic and are set to include wheels, tyres, interior trims and restyled front and rear bumpers. “After that,” Hennessey says, “we will see what might be possible in terms of adding more power.”

It’s almost like he can’t help himself from boosting power. It’s what he does.

It also speaks volumes that a Texan petrolhead grasps which way the global performance car market is trending.

“Nearly all of our clients still want raw, powerful ICE engines,” he says. “But some of them have begun to add an EV to their collections for daily driver duties. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel in the electrified market. We just want to make it roll a little faster and cooler.”

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Given the repeatability of performance has been one of the key Taycan development criteria, perhaps Hennessey feels that there’s a degree of overengineering there that can be teased out into greater performance.

The Taycan Turbo S will accelerate to 200km/h in 9.8 seconds which, for some frame of reference, easily betters the 10.5 seconds of a Tesla Model S Performance.

One thing’s for sure. Hennessey would need to do a lot of fettling to get it to equal two other famously electrified Porsches. The 918 Spyder demolishes the 200km/h sprint in just 7.0s and the 919 Hybrid MK II racer would detain you for a mere 4.5s.