AutoComplete: Porsche's Taycan is here, and much more from around the auto world
Cars
Welcome to Roadshow's AutoComplete, your weekly round of the biggest news in the automotive world.
This week we have news on Bugatti breaking a 300 mile per hour mark, Lamborghini's first hybrid, and the Corvette convertible.
But first, let's start with the Porsche Taycan.
Porsche finally dropped the production version of its first fully electric vehicle to take on and boy is it a looker.
The top tier Turbo S trim apart from having kind of a dumb name, text, 750 horsepower and more or less a gazillion pound feet of torque Other cool features include carbon ceramic, breaks his standard, a two speed rear axle and all of Porsches typical chassis tricks that should make the take on the best driving EV ever.
Of course, being a Porsche, you're going to pay for the privilege of swapping about in And [UNKNOWN] how much you ask?
Well, for the Taycan Turbo S, you're looking at an entry price of around $185,000 before options, and of course, this is a German car so the options list runs deep, so deep it'll put your **** to sleep.
Figuratively speaking of course.
As of now, Porsche has only debuted the upper turbo and turbo S trims, but we expected to offer some more affordable versions that should slid in somewhere between the Cyan and Panemera.
People have been clamouring for Bugatti to take its Chiron hyper car out for a top speed run since the car came out a few years ago.
And many of us thought it was kind of interesting, since the whole top speed fastest production car thing was a big part of how the Veyron was marketed.
Well apparently we've all complained enough for Bugatti to have finally acquiesced sort of.
Because it took a special hot rodden Chiron out to the Volkswagen Ehra-Lessien test track and will be dammed if it didn't do a Two certified 304.77 miles per hour.
Of course, being the painfully curious journalist types that we are we're still curious what a bone stock standard Sharon would do in similar conditions.
We feel kind of bad for Lamborghini right now, because it shows this week of all weeks to drop the news of its new hybrid hypercar, which it's calling the siren and it's going to be pretty tough for anyone to talk to God.
He's big news.
Let alone the push that icon lunch still the same it's definitely worth talking about because this new technological tear is Lamborghini's first crack at a hybrid power train unlike your neighbor's prius though SIN ditches the battery in favor of a much faster acting supercapacitor this means that it'll charge real fast and discharge even faster helping the scion reach its headline 819 horsepower figure When the first Aston Martin Vanquish came out, it managed to blow pretty much everyone who saw it away with its incredibly beautiful proportions.
But unfortunately that sense of all faded pretty quickly once he got in and started driving thanks in large part to its terrible transmission and questionable build quality.
Aston later offered owners a chance to send their cars back at their own expense to the factory for a conversion to a true three pedals six speed manual gearbox which helped a lot but by then the vanquish was mostly a footnote.
Famed automotive designer Ian Callum doesn't think that should be the case though.
So he went about modifying the original vanquish to bring it up to 2019 standards.
The result is frankly staggering.
We love the wider stance, the vastly upgraded interior, new Aero bits and of course we love the added power for the glorious sounding naturally aspirated V 12.
Engine.
Kalin designed is planning on building just 25 of these.
So if you've got a pile of money to burn and a deep love Aston Martin's Act fast.
Tesla's supercharger network has been quietly creeping across the globe, which is good news for owners, but European Tesla owners are getting some truly great news, because the big T is bumping its charge rate for its Euro V2 Superchargers from just 120 kilowatts all the way up to 150 kilowatts and that should mean a decent improvement in charge speed.
For people on the go, interestingly and somewhat a typically we didn't actually hear about this news from Tesla.
Instead, a European Tesla owner tweeted about the new charge rate and the company confirmed his suspicions with a retweet.
Fiat's 500 may have been the standard bearer for the brand's returned to the US.
But lack of meaningful changes to the platform over the last eight years has meant that sales aren't all that great and because of that FCA is killing the 500.
500 E and 500 [UNKNOWN] for the US market, the 500 X and 500 L are still sticking around as is the 124 spider.
The brand expects its current US inventory of vehicles to last their next year.
So if you want to indulge your Cinquecento fantasies you better do it quick People are hyped over the 2020 Corvette and all of the performance its mid-engine layout promises.
But there are still plenty of folks for whom it's not enough.
Those folks are called dads, and their appetites for cheap American speed won't be sated until Chevy releases a drop-top version.
Luckily for those jean-shorts enthusiasts, the general is listening, and it's planning on releasing a Vert version as early as next month.
This tidbit of information comes courtesy of a GM plant manager and those dudes have to be reliable, right?
Volkswagen is killing the Beetle in its current form.
And unless you're some kind of Beetle diehard it's really not something that most people are kicking up much of fuss over.
That doesn't mean that VW is abandoning its original moneymaker entirely though, instead it's introducing something called the E beetle at the Frankfurt Motor Show and it's a lot cooler than we would have guessed.
See, what Volkswagen is doing is taking classic beetles and yanking up the stinky, slow and clattering air cooled engine and replacing it with the electric drive train from India.
E up city car.
This means that the curb weight jumps up a bunch.
But with 81 horsepower and a boatload of torque on tap, the little lightning bug is still good for a zero to 60 sprint, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 seconds.
And frankly, that's plenty quick for us.
We're on the schoolyard is that VW is also planning on.
Giving the type 2 bus and maybe even the Porsche 356 the same treatment Ford might be getting ready to debut its Mustang inspired EV-SUV in L.A this year though that's not confirmed but we do know that it's using a test model of that vehicle to do a little good old fashioned debunking when it comes to people's preconceptions of what an electric vehicle is like to drive and how to perform in harsh winter conditions.
Did so in a couple of videos.
Spoiler alert, the EV's are super fun to drive and it looks like it's handling winter weather just fine, but who knows, maybe all that camouflage is keeping it warm.
But in any case, you're probably just as ready to see this mock E, SUV thing or whatever Ford is calling it now, as we are.
So, hopefully we're not kept waiting too much longer.
Faraday Future is somehow still soldiering on despite massive layoffs, countless set backs, and the whole, you know not having actually built a car thing.
But, it thinks that maybe some new leadership will change that.
To that end it's gone and hired itself a brand new CEO.
Karsten Brightfield has experience with alternative fuel vehicles, having been a big part of the team that brought the futuristic BMW I8 to market.
And more recently, also served as the CEO of Biden.
That's it for auto complete this week.
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And we'll see you again next week.
