Watch Porsche's Taycan Super EV in a Wild Stunt on an Aircraft Carrier

• Porsche rolls up to the electric Taycan's debut on Wednesday, September 4, with a video to highlight its extreme acceleration and braking prowess.
• It all involves an aircraft carrier and seasoned stunt driver Shea Holbrook.
• C/D had a ride in a prototype of the Taycan, and we're here to say, the EV is more exciting than it looks on video.

If you’re going to pull a stunt, make it look dangerous and impossible to repeat. Porsche had that in mind with this video of its upcoming 2020 Taycan EV.

Shea Holbrook, the chosen stunt driver strapped inside a prototype Taycan, burns more adrenaline in a weekend than most people leak out over a decade. She’s as comfortable lapping a Honda Accord in the Pirelli World Challenge series as she is strapped to an NHRA jet dragster or jumping ramps as a competitive water skier. Holbrook knows speed. So when Porsche posts video featuring her and the Taycan accelerating on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, naturally we're going to watch.

We know the electric Taycan is going to accelerate quickly (we just got a ride a couple weeks back in a similar prototype). We know it’s going to brake quickly, too. An F/A-18 fighter, with assistance from a steam-powered catapult on deck, can reach roughly 165 mph using less than 900 feet of runway. Holbrook hit 90 mph in 422 feet and slammed the brakes, leaving a whole 98 feet of runway ahead of her. Scary as a driver? Absolutely. On camera, that rush isn’t there, unfortunately.

Jaguar sent an F-Pace up a 63-foot-tall loop-the-loop that pulled 6.5 g's at the peak—so much that racing driver Terry Grant had to use hand controls to keep the throttle fully pinned down. Tanner Foust 180’d a Genesis G70 underneath a tractor-trailer on a city street. Tesla launched a Roadster into space with a dummy astronaut in the driver’s seat. Hell, even BMW’s completely fake aircraft carrier stunt where an M4 appears to ride within an inch of the ship’s edge is more entertaining. Porsche admitted that it tried hitting the 0-100-0 mark—the hallmark acceleration and braking metric cemented by Carroll Shelby’s Cobra—and settled for 90.

But Porsche doesn’t do stunts, anyway. The company proves the capability of its cars through record-setting lap times on the Nürburgring and useful demos, like launching the Taycan to 124 mph 26 times in a row and losing just eight-tenths of a second between the slowest and fastest drag. That's impressive. So we say, let's let the Hollywood types shock us with physical feats and get Porsche back to showing the serious business of electric sports cars that don't overheat.

By: Car and Driver