Charging a Porsche Taycan 4S Using Pikes Peak Mountain

From the October 2021 issue of Car and Driver.

At 14,115 feet above sea level in Colorado, we found ourselves in a pickle. A $136,190, 562-hp German pickle. Our Porsche Taycan 4S—with only 6 percent of the battery remaining and an indicated 12 miles of range—needed to charge. There's no practical place to plug in an electric car at the top of Pikes Peak, but there's plenty of potential energy in a 5128-pound sedan staring down a very long hill.

For most of the year, the Pikes Peak Highway, located near Colorado Springs, Colorado, is a scenic passage of paved hairpins stuck to mountains of granite. But for one day in June, it is closed to the public for a morning of high-speed, high-risk carving known as the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb event. That's what brought us here, the 99th running of a real-life Gran Turismo that isn't yet tooled for electrification.

The nearest charger from the Pikes Peak summit is 30 miles back into downtown Colorado Springs. Although the 12 miles of indicated range was based on driving up a volcanic wall for 20 minutes, we were confident the negative grade would refill our batteries, or in the worse case scenario, make pushing a 2.5-ton Porsche easier.