We’ve sampled coultless flavours of the Porsche Taycan over the years, yet they linger in our temporal lobes because it’s one of, if not the best-driving EV out there. We don’t just mean straight-line speed or pin-you-to-the-seat insta-torque; we mean how you interact with the car through its steering wheel, how it’s more of a deft dance partner and less a blunt instrument. Our latest rendezvous with the 2025 Porsche Taycan GTS Sport Turismo affirms this once again, but this time, we have context.
The status quo among enthusiasts is that wagons are the best. They put them on a pedestal because they’re roomy and practical like an SUV, but keep the handling and driving dynamics of a car. Sounds like a win, right? Now throw a bunch of horsepower into the mix, along with a bunch of tech and driver assists that make you look like a much better driver than you really are, and you have a very niche but very effective hype machine.
Today, in the realm of fast (and expensive) wagons, there’s three of ’em — this Taycan, the BMW M5 Touring, and the Audi RS6 GT. Somehow, we’ve managed to drive all three.
What’s new for 2025?
This year, Porsche staves off a midlife crisis with a round of updates to the Taycan lineup. Park next to an older one at a charging station, and while you two commiserate about Taycan resale values, you’ll pick out the sharper lines and reshaped cooling ducts up front, the subtly different headlight and tail light designs, and the new wheel designs on the new one.
Porsche also improved the Taycan’s range and charging for 2025. Lower-end trims now receive the previously optional, 83.6 kWh “Performance” battery pack as standard equipment, and a new, larger, and lighter 97 kWh unit takes its place as the upgrade. Both of those figures are net (read: usable) capacity. All Taycan GTSes come standard with the bigger battery and pairs it to a faster on-board charger. If you’re lucky enough to find a DC fast-charger in the real world that’s actually fast, Porsche says the Taycan can now recharge at up to 320 kW, and yields a 10-to-80 per cent charge in as little as 18 minutes.
A revised electric motor on the rear axle rounds out the changes. It’s supposedly better at managing heat, and like the new battery pack, the new electric motor is lighter than before. All these updates underneath are good enough to bump estimated range to 449 kilometres, up from 396 km before. We think Porsche is being too modest; at one point, we saw real-world estimates of up to 520 km on an 85 per cent charge.
The rest of the Taycan GTS remains untouched. It’s all the better for it. In Porsche vernacular, the letters G-T-S typically represent the sweet spot between bang-for-your-buck — if that idea even applies to a Porsche — and performance. The Taycan GTS Sport Turismo fits into that role nicely, fulfilling the role of a speedy longroof quite well without feeling wasted on the road.
M5 Touring: The new brute on the block
To say the 2025 BMW M5 Touring was hyped up is an understatement. This is the first time BMW ever did an M5 wagon in North America — a plug-in hybrid, at that — so naturally, expectations were lofty. It didn’t help that the M5 sedan preceding it by a few months had already amassed a reputation; at the risk of beating a dead horse into an even finer pulp, the new M5 is heavy. It’s certainly the heaviest among today’s expensive super-wagon trio, tipping the scales at 5,530 pounds. That’s a good bit heavier than the 5,152-pound Taycan GTS Sport Turismo, and a full thousand pounds heavier than the RS6.
But the M5 Touring makes up for the hefty bottom line with hefty performance. A familiar 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 makes 577 horsepower and 553 pound-feet of torque, which frankly would’ve been enough, but BMW just had to make it a plug-in hybrid. That extra running gear — an electric motor integrated into the M5’s transmission, and a 14.8 kWh lithium-ion battery pack — boosts total output to a whopping 717 hp and 738 lb-ft of torque. It’ll do the zero-to-100 km/h run in 3.6 seconds according to BMW, and if you keep your foot in it, it’ll top out at 305 km/h provided you’re working with the M Driver’s Pack. With everything cranked up to 11, the V8 bellowing furiously, and the electrons pitching in all their might, the M5 shoots off the line furiously and keeps pulling and pulling and pulling. It simply refuses to let up.
The Taycan GTS is down on output relative to the M5, but it matches the Bimmer’s fury. As a baseline, the Porsche puts out 590 horsepower and 534 pound-feet of torque. Tapping the ‘push-to-pass’ button on the steering wheel engages an overboost of sorts, giving you an extra 93 horsepower for a 10-second window, and launch control unlocks the Taycan’s full 690 hp and 582 lb-ft of torque off the line. Despite the spec-sheet deficit, the Taycan GTS is a rocket — its baseline output is plenty for every possible scenario you could possibly encounter on your commute, be it a short merge lane, passing an 18-wheeler crawling up a bridge, or a pull because your lane suddenly cleared up. Activating push-to-pass or launch control transforms the car into an interdimensional teleportation device; our finely calibrated butt dynos suggest Porsche’s claimed zero-to-100 km/h run of 3.3 seconds feels almost conservative. And we thought the M5 Touring was wicked fast…
Audi RS6 GT: A new spin on an OG
But there’s more to life than straight-line speed. The Volkswagen empire seems to understand this, at least among their speedy wagons. Despite their obvious differences in forward motivation, the 2025 Audi RS6 GT and Taycan GTS Sport Turismo both feel similarly calibrated. The RS6 GT retains the 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8, putting out the same 621 horsepower and 627 pound-feet of torque as the regular one.
Ah, the regular one. Our key takeaway after living with the RS6 GT for a week was that it didn’t feel meaningfully different from the regular one — at least, different enough to justify the extra hundred thousand dollars Audi wants for these things. To their credit, Audi’s futzed with the chassis a great deal and saved quite a bit of weight — the RS6 GT is the lightest of the bunch here, at an impressive 4,575 pounds. It’s just that Audi asking so much more over the standard car for chassis tweaks and admittedly very cool-looking stickers and wheels rubs us the wrong way.
That’s too bad, because the RS6 GT feels the most rewarding and engaging to drive, and there’s a similar feeling of playfulness to the Taycan GTS Sport Turismo. They both feel similarly responsive to inputs, they both have surprisingly decent steering feel, and they both have heaps of grip and hold a line incredibly well through a tight on-ramp. They’re both pretty well-matched in terms of head-turning ability, too. We couldn’t so much as pick our nose behind the wheel of the RS6 GT, just like we couldn’t charge up the Taycan without someone else coming up to us.
Dear God, wrap it up already
Look past the obvious differences under the hood. What we have here are three distinct takes on the super-fast and super-expensive super-wagon formula. They all come in around similar price points, too. An M5 Touring loaded up with all the right stuff will run you about $160,000. The RS6 GT costs an eye-watering $249,700 and you can’t even buy one, anyway, but a regular one with the good stuff — the Dynamics package, brown leather interior, and the 19-speaker Bang & Olufsen sound system are must-haves in our books — will run you about the same as the M5. The Taycan GTS Sport Turismo kicks off at $169,500, and our tester worked out to a hair over $198,000 as-tested.
That’s hardly pocket change for most, but you have to admit, it’s kind of great in this day and age having not one, but three super-wagons tho choose from if you have $200,000 you don’t know what to do with, and you don’t want an SUV. But even armed with context, the 2025 Porsche Taycan GTS Sport Turismo isn’t leaving our collective temporal lobe anytime soon.
