Porsche Macan Electric Review & Prices

This is the Porsche Macan Electric, an all-electric SUV that’s usefully practical for everyday life, suitably posh inside, and great fun to drive on a twisty road. It’s the first time the Macan is offered with purely electric power. It’s a bit like Lewis Hamilton – sporty, but environmentally conscious.

If you’re looking for a posh electric SUV the Macan Electric is one of a number of cars you could consider, including the Polestar 4, BMW iX and the Audi Q6 e-tron, with which it shares much of its mechanical makeup.

With tempting alternatives aplenty, the Macan Electric gets off to a good start by being a handsome thing to look at. The sporty, sloping roofline plunges into slim rear lights and new raised badging, while at the front you get narrow running lights similar to the look of the Porsche Taycan.

Inside, you get a twin-screen setup that will be familiar if you’ve spent any time in the Taycan, with sharp graphics and snappy response to your touch, while a third screen for the front passenger is available as an optional extra.

Porsche Macan Electric: electric range, battery and charging data

Range: 367-399 miles
Efficiency: 2.9 - 3.7mi/kWh
Battery size: 100kWh
Max charge speed: 270kW
Charge time AC: 10hrs, 0-100% @ 11kW
Charge time DC: 21mins, 10-80% @ 270kW
Charge port location: Left and right side rear
Power outputs: 360hp / 408hp / 516hp / 639hp

Quality oozes from the posh leathers you’ll find throughout the Macan’s cabin – it just feels expensive. The design is more classy and elegant compared with the minimalist, modern look of the Polestar 4 or the almost sci-fi feel of the BMW iX.

The Porsche is practical, too, with a deep, felt-lined cubby hole beneath the armrest and large door bins. The cupholders are recessed so your bottles don’t get in the way of controlling the climate settings, which is really well thought out.

You might find it a bit tight in the back if you’re over six-feet-tall, but overall practicality is good – the boot has a capacity of 540 litres, which is more than you get in the BMW iX and Polestar 4. The Porsche also gets 84 litres of storage under the bonnet.

There are four versions of the Macan Electric, ranging from the base Macan that focuses on going far between charges, up to the Turbo, which has incredible performance thanks to a massive 639hp. All have impressive ranges, but the entry level model can go up to 399 miles on a charge in official tests, making it the most usable day to day. It’s no slouch either, and comes well-equipped, so you won’t feel short-changed in that regard despite not going for the big shiny fast one.

All models get ultra-fast public charging of up to 270kW, so the 10-80% top up takes just 21 minutes at a suitably rapid charger, meaning you don’t need to worry about long charge stops on a road trip.

And road trip you will want to do, because the Porsche Macan Electric is a lovely thing to drive. It’s comfortable and refined at higher speeds, smooth and easy to drive around town, and one of the best electric cars to drive down a country road.

Porsche really cares about how its cars feel behind the wheel and that shows – the steering is perfectly weighted making the car easy to place on a winding road, the suspension soaks up bumps so broken B-roads don’t throw you off course, and the brakes are well tuned so you don’t get the inconsistent feel common to other EVs.

In other words, this is a car that’s spacious, posh, and made for people who care about how a car drives. If that sounds right up your street you can get a great price with Carwow’s Porsche Macan Electric lease deals. You can also browse used Macan Electrics as well as other used Porsches. When the time comes to sell your current car, Carwow can help with that too.

The Porsche Macan Electric starts at £68,500 with four versions to choose from offering different performance and range figures. The entry level model is the slowest but goes the furthest on a charge, then it’s almost £3,000 to jump to the 4, and another £5,000-plus for the 4S. Prices then take a leap to nearly £97,000 for the top-of-the-range Turbo model.

That makes it competitively priced with alternatives, as both the BMW iX and Polestar 3 start at a similar price. You can get the Polestar 4 and Audi Q6 e-tron from around £60,000.

The Porsche Macan Electric is easy to drive around town, but blisteringly good fun on a twisty road, too. Visibility could be better, though

In town

The Porsche Macan Electric is a gentle car over bumps, especially if you spec it with the optional air suspension, which makes it positively cushion-like. There’s very good noise insulation, with both exterior noises and suspension thumps kept well under control, so it’s a very relaxing car to drive around town.

With the driving mode switch set to ‘Normal’ the steering is light enough to make parking and tight turns easy enough, but still with that reassuring chunkiness that reminds you you’re in a Porsche. There is a limitation with one-pedal driving — the brake regeneration effect is quite gentle, so it’s hard to drive the Macan Electric around town without resorting to pressing the actual brake pedal.

The seating position in the Macan Electric is quite low, which is good for twisty roads, but you might want to bring the seat up a bit to give you a slightly better view out around town. Visibility is okay – there are quite thick roof pillars, but the pronounced front wheelarches mean it’s easy to place the Macan accurately. The view out the rear window is quite poor, but at least there are decent door mirrors.

The Macan Electric comes as standard with front and rear parking sensors and a reversing camera, but a 360-degree parking camera costs extra as does a rear windscreen wiper, which can make for a lack of visibility at slow speeds on a winter’s morning.

On the motorway

Although tyre noise makes itself known at higher speeds, the Macan Electric does keep its refinement cool on long motorway runs, and it’s an exceptionally comfortable car, especially if it’s a version fitted with air suspension.

For the ultimate in responsiveness when trying to merge with fast-flowing traffic, it helps to have the driving mode switched to Sport Plus, at which point any Macan Electric — but especially the super-rapid Turbo — will slam your head back into the seat with some proper venom when you accelerate hard.

As standard, the Macan Electric gets regular cruise control, not radar-guided cruise, so if you’re constantly heading up and down the motorway, spending extra to get adaptive cruise might be a good idea. There is standard lane-keeping and lane-changing steering though, as well as driver awareness detection to make sure you’re staying alert on those longer drives.

On a twisty road

The Macan Electric is great on a twisty road. Set the car into Sport Plus mode and the suspension keeps it very level through corners, with almost no body lean at all.

Unlike many other electric cars, the Macan Electric’s motors and battery have been set up to build its performance as you drive, rather than just dumping all the power onto the tarmac at once, so it feels more like a high-performance petrol car.

The four-wheel drive Macan Electric models can actually send all of the car’s power to the rear electric motor, which makes this zero-emission SUV feel rather old-school with its rear-wheel drive, tail-happy character, so it’s much more adjustable and playful. It’s a neat trick.

The brakes are astonishing, and also feel like traditional petrol-car brakes, as Porsche has done a terrific job of blending the brake energy recuperation with the actual physical squeezing of callipers onto discs. It feels totally natural, not something you can say for every EV.

Speaking of which, compared to the (more affordable) Tesla Model Y Performance, the Tesla can give you thrills in a straight-line with its performance, but it can’t come close to matching the Macan’s fun factor around corners.

Interior storage and boot space are largely decent, but the BMW iX is roomier for those in the back seats

The Porsche Macan Electric has a deep storage box under the front seat armrest, which is lined with felt so anything left in there won’t rattle around. The cupholders on the centre console are not only backlit with ambient lighting, but they’re also usefully deep so if you stash a tall bottle of water or fizzy drink in there, it doesn’t get in the way of your elbow when you’re driving.

There’s an open-sided storage area in front of the cupholders, below the climate control panel, and another small lidded storage area up top, which is home to the wireless phone charger.

The glovebox is reasonably sized, and has a lovely damped action when you open it. The door bins are a good size too, and segmented so that a big bottle of water can be propped up and won’t fly around when you accelerate.

Space in the back seats

The Macan Electric is definitely more spacious in the back seats than the old petrol-powered version. There’s generous knee-room even with a tall driver sitting in the front. Porsche shapes its battery so that there’s, theoretically, more space for your feet in the back (hilariously, this is known by Porsche as a ‘foot garage’…) but even so, the Macan’s rear seat does feel a bit low-set, so your knees feel like they’re sticking up in the air a bit too much.

There’s also not enough space under the front seats to tuck your feet unless those in the front have lifted them up a bit. Headroom in the back is okay, but if the car is fitted with the optional panoramic glass roof, it gets a bit tight.

There’s a useful climate control panel in the back, but the sliders for the rear air vents feel terribly cheap.

There are ISOFIX anchor points in the outer two rear seats, and the door bins are good, but annoyingly the rear windows don’t wind all the way down. There’s no getting away from the fact that a BMW iX is roomier in the back, either.

Boot space

The 540 litres of boot capacity is a decent amount for the Macan Electric. That means it has more boot capacity than either the BMW iX or the Polestar 4, and even slightly more than its cousin, the Audi Q6 e-tron.

There’s a small load lip, but not enough to worry about, and there are chrome scuff plates to prevent scratches when loading in large objects. There are netted storage areas at each side of the boot, and stretchy bands which can be used to hold bags or shopping in place, as well as bag hooks and tie-down points.

The rear seats split 40:20:40 with a load-through centre rear seat so you can carry long, narrow items and still have two rear seat passengers. The seats fold down by tugging handles inside the boot, and they fold almost entirely flat.

There’s no space to store the luggage cover under the boot floor, which is annoying, but there is a slot which allows you to store it upright against the back seats.

There’s also an 84-litre storage area in the nose of the Macan Electric, which is perfect for stashing charging cables and which has an optional hands-free opening system where you just brush the badge on the bonnet to trigger the latch.

The Porsche Macan Electric’s interior is modern, high-tech and well-built, but the black plastic can mark quite easily

The Porsche Macan Electric’s cabin has clearly been inspired by the Taycan electric saloon, and the whole effect is that it looks very high-tech and modern.

There’s a set of high-definition digital dials behind the wheel, on a gently curving 12.3-inch screen. There are plenty of options for the screen layout and what information is being displayed, all controlled by a simple switch on the steering wheel.

The main infotainment screen is slick and responsive, with very sharp graphics. There are handy functions such as being able to modify the different driving modes so that they suit your needs. There’s also an optional passenger side screen, on which the person in the front passenger seat can set the sat-nav, pick music, or watch YouTube videos, but it seems a bit pointless when they could just use their own phone or tablet.

Overall quality is excellent, especially with the ‘extended leather’ pack — the stitching of which is laser-straight — but the black plastic trim in the cabin marks really easily. Thankfully, Porsche does stick with proper physical controls for the heating and air conditioning, which takes a lot of the strain off the main infotainment screen.

With a 100kWh battery, the Macan Electric has a decent claimed range figure of up to 399 miles for the basic model, but that drops away progressively as you go up the the range (and power output) through the Macan 4 (380 miles), the Macan 4S (378 miles) and finally to the Turbo (367 miles).

That makes it about average among alternatives – you can go further for less in the Polestar 4, while the longest-range versions of the BMW iX can go up to 427 miles, though not all versions of the Audi Q6 e-tron or iX will go above 300 miles.

Naturally, if you’re using all of the copious performance on offer, especially that of the Turbo, you can expect real-world range to drop a lot. During our testing, we saw efficiency of 3.5 miles per kWh, which would give you a range of about 333 miles.

The Macan can charge impressively quickly, at up to 270kW from a rapid DC charging point, but the optional electrically-powered charging flap seems like a needless extra expense and proves quite fiddly to operate.

Being an electric car means the Macan Electric attracts the lowest Benefit-in-Kind rate for company car choosers, as well as falling into the lowest first-year Vehicle Excise Duty band. However, its high purchase price means you’ll have to pay the expensive car supplement in years two to six.

Why does Porsche charge extra for rear passenger side airbags in the Macan Electric? They’re not even an expensive option — less than £400 — so why not just fit them as standard? It seems like a baffling decision for a car which is already pretty expensive anyway.

As standard, the Macan does come with traffic sign recognition, front and rear parking sensors and a reversing camera, lane-keeping assistance with emergency stop function, lane change assist, regular cruise control, ‘intersection assist’ which stops you turning across the path of another car, and driver awareness detection.

Euro NCAP scored the Macan Electric its highest five-star rating, with seriously impressive scores of 90% in both adult and child occupant protection. That's actually slightly lower than the mechanically similar Audi Q6 e-tron, but there's only a couple of percentage points in it.

It’s a little too soon for us to get a handle on how reliable the Porsche Macan Electric will be, but the overall omens are good. Porsche has a strong reputation for reliability and solidity, and the fact that all of the underpinnings and electric bits are shared with Audi will help.

In the most recent Driver Power owner satisfaction survey, Porsche finished in fourth place as one of the best to own, which is an impressive result and speaks to strong customer satisfaction. The only thing that gives us pause is that a substantial 36% of owners reported problems with their car.