If you've ever wanted a Porsche Taycan battery, I have great news: An alleged train derailment has made your dream come true sooner than expected.
According to a listing on car parts and DIY site Jag35 (spotted by our friend Peter Holderith of Motor1), a train carrying some Porsche Taycans derailed, damaging the Porsche EVs beyond repair. Parts companies were able to salvage various parts, including the battery modules that make up the Taycan's powerful 800-volt class battery.
The large Taycan battery is made up of 33 modules, each of which contains 12 cells. Jag35 is charging $199 per cell, which means you can get a Taycan Turbo's worth of battery modules—with 93.4 kWh of capacity—for $6,567. That number doesn't include taxes or shipping, though. Since batteries are heavy and large and require special shipping considerations for safety, expect that to add a significant amount to the price. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn't include the mountings, casing, cooling, wiring and shielding you'd need to turn it into something safe and usable.
Still, it's a deal. The Taycan is built on an 800-volt architecture, allowing the battery to charge and discharge rapidly. A new Taycan charged from 8 to 80% in just 16 minutes in InsideEVs testing, the fastest charge we've ever recorded. The Taycan Turbo GT also makes 1,092 hp, so these batteries can put out plenty of juice.
Of course, getting an entire Taycan drivetrain for any swaps you have in mind would be better. The safety controls, battery management, motor integration, charge integration and more are all hard to safely do on your own. You're unlikely to match what Porsche's factory engineers can do with the same batteries. But I've confirmed with a source at Porsche that there's no reason these batteries wouldn't work outside of the Taycan. If you've already got a pack design and are just looking for a good set of cells for a high-performance homebrew EV, you can't do much better than these.
