You’re sitting in the driver’s seat of an SUV. Pretend for a moment that you can’t tell you’re in a Porsche – the familiar emblem is not on the steering wheel emblem and other giveaways like the seconds-hand-only dashboard clock or the domineering rev counter on the instrument cluster are obscured. You might be wondering what on Earth the SUV designer was thinking. The steering wheel is too small and too stiff. The roofline is a little too close to your head. Your seating position is lower and less upright than you’d expect. The ride is firm – not harsh, but when you go over a gravel-strewn patch of road, you can feel the grains of sand being ground under the rubber.
It’s when you hit the highway that it starts to click. There’s a fair bit of power here, but more notable is the seamless gear-shifting – you count eight of them – and the even response throughout the RPM range that is distinctly sporty.
Your exit’s up ahead. There’s no traffic so you decide to gun it and take the corner at speed. You’re expecting something by now, but you’re still taken by surprise. The SUV is unhesitatingly balanced throughout the corner – taut throughout but supple when it needs to be. You marvel at the unshakeable poise you just experienced. And then you realise you’re in a Porsche.
A Porsche Cayenne, to be exact, a name that you know well. After all, it’s been around since 2003, when it blazed a trail for the upmarket, sporty SUV. You recall viewing it with scepticism, too. Why would you expect Porsche, a legendary sports car manufacturer, to dabble with the unwieldy SUV? But the Cayenne stuck around, its popularity proven time and again. You’ve never stopped seeing it on the road. It’s now in its third generation, and on 10 December last year, its one millionth unit rolled off the production line.
And now you’re driving one and you understand. The Cayenne doesn’t play at being sporty – it just is – and it doesn’t play at being a sports car – it just isn’t.
The base model has a relatively modest 3.0-litre turbocharged V6, which is good for 0-100km/hr in 6.2 seconds. This is modest by the monstrous standards of today, but you reflect that 340hp is in that sweet spot of usable road power, where it’s quick enough that you don’t have to think twice but not so powerful that you get timid. There’s always an added thrill to pushing an engine to its limit and here, you can.
You wouldn’t know it unless you looked, but there’s a lot of technology lurking here – though there must be, given that the Cayenne weighs two tonnes but feels like two-thirds that. Rear-axle steering explains the surprising, occasionally telepathic agility, and there’s the active roll stabilisation that accounts for how such a considerable frame stays so flat at the corners. It all combines to make you feel like you can live up to your hidden potential as a racing driver, but it’s also so grounded that it never steers into delusions of grandeur. It is, you guess, a very Porsche thing to experience. It makes you look forward to the next bit of road, hoping that it’s a challenging but traffic-free stretch.
You ease up a bit and settle in. There’s a thrum to the cabin, of road noise. There are other passenger vehicles that are quieter, but they wouldn’t be able to provide anywhere near the road connection that you have now. The Cayenne’s not uncomfortable, but it’s also not isolated. All the little foibles of before that were out-of-place in a people-carrier make perfect sense in the context of a driver-centric vehicle.
But it’s not as if your passengers would be neglected. There’s a reasonable amount of room for four adult passengers, even if they’re missing out by not driving. The boot is not as cavernous as you might have thought, but you still reckon you could fit three or four flat-packed office chairs inside it. You could always lower the rear seats if you really needed the space. With the enhanced premium package offered to Cayenne buyers in Malaysia at no extra cost, you get Bose surround sound speakers in corners you didn’t know were there and the infotainment screen is an accommodating 12.3 inches across. You’re a bit undecided on the glossy touch-sensitive pads on the centre console – purists like yourself are still fans of the tangibility of old-school buttons – but the haptic feedback buzz provides some affirmation, at least.
It is, in other words, perfectly up to your day-to-day, with an extra helping of deep motoring satisfaction. There’s a time to be a purist, to pursue the ultimate in compromise-free experiences – and then there’s a time to not worry, just jump in, drive, and trust in your car’s flexibility. It leaves more time to enjoy the drive. The Cayenne is flexible and it may not be a purist’s car, but it’s definitely a driver’s car.
