The new electric 2025 Porsche Macan line now offers a base rear-drive model, and it’s a handsome unit. Simpler and less expensive while retaining impressive electric stats, this latest implementation of the Audi-Porsche ‘PPE’ modular EV platform rides with rich refinement and a mild whiff of fun.
2025 Porsche Macan rear-drive range
The big news in the new base Macan is its simplified rear-wheel-drive powertrain. Slimming back from dual-motor all-wheel drive to a single motor powering just the rear wheels, the sans-suffix Macan runs less weight than the Macan 4, 4S, or Turbo — and a little less energy-drawing hardware.
Of course, any significant hardware cost savings are relatively marginal against the overall pile of high-dollar metal crammed into the Macan’s chassis. Fitting the same 100-kWh (95 kWh usable) battery pack as the new electric Turbo, that’s just nearly as many prismatic lithium-ion cells as you’ll get in the range-maxxing facelifted Taycan.
From this capacity and lighter single-motor load, Porsche claims a European WLTP range figure of up to 641 km. These Euro figures tend to read longer than North American test cycles, but assuming they’re usually some 22% optimistic, this calculates to an estimated maximum range of ~525 kilometres. Take the same calculation to WLTP consumption estimates of 17-19.8 kWh/100 km, that should look like ~20-24 km/100 km on the NRCan spreadsheets.
This calculated figure aligns with observations on the road. Running a mix of 120 km/h highway, quiet 80 km/h rural routes, and slow 30 km/h in-town stretches, consumption from reset indicated an average of 20.9 kWh/100 km.
Charging is the same high-speed arrangement as the Taycan: 800 volts, and up to 270 kW from a DC fast charger. Porsche says the 10-80% stretch can fill in as few as 21 minutes under optimal conditions, right on pace with the smaller 87.4-kWh Hyundai E-GMPs’ 18 minutes.
The 800-volt architecture is important to more than just the outright high-voltage peak here, for it also enables the Macan’s battery to make more even of lower-strung 400-volt chargers through ‘bank charging.’ Depending on input, the battery’s controllers can effectively manage the battery pack like a series of two 400-volt blocks to charge at 800V, or can feed it like a pair of parallel 400V units. In short, this means the electrons still run at the same speed but in twice the volume. Secondhand buyers down the line may have to navigate bank-charged packs’ risk of uneven aging and mismatched internal resistances, but that’s not the initial lessee’s problem.
Tech in the 2025 Porsche Macan
One of the new Macan EV’s most notable updates is imperceptible from almost any angle, yet hits you in the face the moment you hit the driver’s seat. Porsche has leaned into augmented reality (AR) with a properly impressive head-up display (HUD) that superimposes live graphics over your view of the road. Distances from other vehicles, twisting lane shape and bounds, and navigation directions project between your eyes and their positions outside, with pointers growing as you approach as though you’re driving with real-life floating Mario Kart arrows.
The specifics are neat, but what’s most important about all of this AR tech is how effectively it communicates the way that the vehicle understands the world around it. By so clearly overlaying what the car sees onto what you actually see, the Macan deepens driver trust in its advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS).
Mechanically, those ADAS systems largely follow what we’ve grown used to from Porsche. Steady and comfortable, Porsche’s adaptive cruise and follow-distance controls, lane-keeping and lane-follow assistance, and camera-based speed-limit detection (and cruise adjustment) were already good. Driven in Germany, where unmarked speed cameras may hide mere metres beyond a sudden speed-limit drop, this automatic limit detection and adjustment was well worth switching on for extra peace of mind. That Euro exchange rate makes any fines hurt on a writer’s salary, after all.
Below the highlight HUD, a curved cluster display stretches pixels to the edges of a rounded bezel. Digital displays often feel cheap, so trading a typical rectangle for this complex shape brings a welcome premium air to the interface. More than this, while not yet OLED, black pixels are almost entirely black for a near-seamless fade into the bezel. Porsche has achieved impressive contrast through its choice of supplier, a welcome boon to night drivers sensitive to bright-black LCD light bleed.
In a welcome departure from Porsche’s lacklustre earlier systems, central infotainment joins the increasing number of manufacturers shifting to Android Automotive OS. Equipped for wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto projection, this system also integrates the usual gamut of native Android-based apps into the car’s primary gauge cluster and HUD.
Unfortunately Porsche has also thrown the option of its silly new passenger-side screens onto the new Macan’s purchase sheet. This option probably won’t find its way into too many of these base-trim Macan EVs, but if you’re thinking about it: these secondary-screen redundant controls generally mirror their centre-screen primaries, albeit often with reduced functionality. Unless your passenger absolutely needs their own map display in search of some perverse topographical titillation, you’d quite surely be better off putting that money elsewhere.
Cruising comfort, not a sporting model
Though plenty for its shape and weight, rear-drive electric torque does not make the base electric Macan inherently sporty. Refreshingly instead, the base Macan eschews the usual high-power power party trick gimmickry of so many contemporary EVs in favour of something more appropriately proportioned to the crossover profile.
In power’s place is a focus on ride and suspension, with a little sway-bar leeway for aggressive cornering thrown in for the sake of brand identity. The base Macan rides straightforward coil-sprung, hydraulically damped multi-link suspension with dual wishbones up front. Whereas higher trims offer the option of active air suspension to specifically address different sorts of driving and conditions, even this basic jack-of-all-trades crossover setup affords a forgiving ride that holds confidently planted at speed.
Cruising at over 210 km/h on derestricted Autobahn feels normal and entirely uneventful — which is also to say unexciting. Cruise set at that maximum figure, the Macan EV damps rebounds with grace. Steering is relaxed at this pace, made even more so by Porsche’s continually improving lane-keep assistance. Energy consumption is of course sub-optimal under such extreme load, but we don’t have the opportunity for that sort of 30 kWh/100 km cruising in Canada anyway.
Even more notable at those speeds is the absence of wind and road noise. Available dual-pane glass joins with the rest of the usual gamut of matted and foam-filling sound insulation, but still more important is an exceedingly slippery drag coefficient of 0.25 which helps minimize noisy confrontations with our atmosphere. Tire drone is a frequent complaint in otherwise-silent EVs (and particularly in broad, drum-rubbered Porsches like the Panamera recently tested here in Canada), but again proved minimal at tremendous speeds. This latter observation should be taken with the caveat that German taxes and standards mean many of their roads are particularly fine and well maintained, while the same may not be the case when cars roll on to coarser Canadian aggregates.
Those looking to indulge in some enthusiastic cornering will benefit from the usual EV-transition lower centre of gravity, wide track with staggered tires, and available thin sporting rubber. Electric power steering is well executed here as on other Porsches, still feeling somewhat connected and enjoyable in significant contrast to peers such as BMW.
Front tires will screech through switchbacks even at the hands of an experienced (or even racing) driver, but as on the highway, the 2.3-ton Macan EV’s effective sound deadening mutes most of this unless you roll the windows down. This acknowledged, even the base Macan EV does not feel so dully disconnected as the aggressively sport-focused but largely uncommunicative Hyundai Ioniq 5 N.
Applying those 335 horsepower and 415 pound-feet of torque to only two wheels, acceleration to 100 km/h is rated at 5.7 seconds. These power figures leave the Macan well behind Genesis’ electric GV70, but still ultimately suit a premium crossover needing to pull a little quicker than average without encroaching on higher models in the product matrix.
Note that power isn’t just a matter of software limitations on the same bits, however. Motors’ inverter throughputs, gearing, and rotor lengths vary across the model line: at 480 amps, the rear-drive Macan’s motor digests barely over half the juice that the 900-amp Macan Turbo puts through its main drive unit.
Costlier way to buy in to a badge
To buy a base-trim Macan is still very much to buy into a badge, but the 800-volt PPE architecture has more going for it as a premium EV powertrain than the gas cars’ standard ‘EA888’ Volkswagen engine could claim. Still, to buy even a base Macan EV is to spend effectively as much as a gas-powered 2025 Macan GTS.
Factor in the $2,950 destination charge, and the rear-wheel-drive 2025 Porsche Macan starts from a base price of $97,850. Subsequent trims nudge upward at $102,250 for the all-wheel-drive Macan 4 and $109,850 for its quicker 4S trim. The 2025 Porsche Macan Turbo EV starts from $130,750 in Canada.
Such pricing is more or less in line with its premium-segment peers and feels worth the step beyond the top Genesis GV70 EV, but still feels steep for what’s ultimately just offering itself as a volume-nameplate Macan. For perspective, the Taycan is priced well beyond the Macan at $138,550 but more naturally fills that price tag’s shoes in a way that a tall family-hauler crossover just doesn’t pull off with the same effortless grace.
Porsche is still building old-gen gas-powered Macans for the foreseeable future, so for all its impressive comforts, my pointer would still be toward a more dynamic gas-PDK sport-trim Macan for the same money. And if Taycan is any indication, you’ll thank me come depreciation.
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