Tesla Owner Finds Model S Too Family-Oriented, Pre-Orders A Porsche Taycan

If you want to make it as an electric car manufacturer, you need to have Norway on your side. The Scandinavian country is one of the biggest markets worldwide for battery-powered vehicles, and Porsche knows that all too well.

Although the all-electric Taycan is still being developed, Porsche is already looking for customers and is targeting not only people with money, but influencers as well.

According to Teslarati, this April the company approached Tesla Model S owner and founder of the Porsche Taycan Norway Facebook group, Jim Roger Johansen, to let him know he had to pay 20,000 Norwegian Crowns (about $2,450) by April 25 if he wanted to keep his place in the priority queue for the Taycan.

At this point, it must be said that Johansen had previously expressed interest into the 600-hp EV when visiting a Porsche dealership earlier in the year, back when the car was known as Mission E. So why does he want a Taycan when he already owns a Model S? Well, it’s because he wants a performance EV in addition to the family-oriented Model S, and the upcoming Tesla Roadster is out of his budget at $200,000.

Now that we know Porsche is already taking pre-orders for the Taycan in Norway, since then books have opened in other markets too, customers there will be glad to learn that Johansen described the reservation process as quick and straightforward. All he needed to do was enter a payment page and perform a credit card transaction. He later received a confirmation email instructing him to wait for a call from the dealer where he would configure the car according to his wishes.

In a follow-up email, Porsche let Johansen know that the reservations were only open for Norway, which it described as “an extraordinary market” for electric cars. The decision seems to be paying off given that it received 2,300 pre-orders from the country so far.

The company also gave the customer free tickets to the 2018 Porsche Festival in Norway (September 8-9) as an sign of appreciation for him being an early reservation holder. Johansen is hoping that a teaser for the Taycan production version would be released there. Porsche is expected to launch the Taycan sometime in 2019, but Johansen doesn’t believe his car will be delivered before 2020.