i'm kelsey mays for cars.com here with
the porsche panamera now in its fifth
year as portions challenger to top shelf
luxury flagships and ends but the
Panamera is technically not a sedan it's
actually a four-seat hatchback and that
makes for some interesting details will
show you more if there's an elephant in
the room with the Panamera it has to be
styling it's been controversial ever
since the car came out kind of a big
long loaded tail sort of update on the
911 even though the two are on
completely different platforms the
Panamera is front-engine the 911 is a
rear-engine here there's an even longer
version believe it or not
now called the executive version of the
Panamera it adds about a half foot of
overall length without the executive
version overall length under 200 inches
pretty small for this class again if
you're comparing it to flagship luxury
sedans a few changes for 2014 include
updates to the front and the rear light
updates there plus new LED headlights
let's get inside and take a look the
Panamera was one of the first cars to
incorporate this sort of flowing water
fall kind of center stack design with
Portia's traditional upright dashboard
that's sort of a look that's gonna cross
the rest of Porsches lineup and it's
aged pretty well materials in our test
car pretty good but there's a lot of
buttons here kind of in the center area
to sort through temperature controls
things for the drive three they're all
kind of merged into this pods pods of
buttons around the gearshift here the
seat remains a little sunken its kind of
around a lot of furniture here not a lot
of room to stretch out but very cockpit
like feel certainly feels at home for
porsche enthusiasts backseat is pretty
nicely packaged here again it's a
two-position backseat I'm six feet tall
that's where I would sit to drive pretty
good legroom leftovers you can see and a
good seating position hide off the
ground and good Headroom leftover often
you have to get one but not the other
executive models have about five inches
of additional legroom if you can believe
it so probably a huge area back here and
a practical advantage of hatchbacks the
seats fold down more than 40 cubic feet
of maximum space with the seats down
obviously a lot bigger past year to
shove things through that even the
folding back seat in just about any
sedan drivetrains in the
panamera include a plug-in hybrid a 310
horsepower v6 all the way up to a 570
horsepower twin-turbo v8 capable of 0 to
60 in just 3.6 seconds we have a
panamera 4s here that means it has 420
horsepower turbocharged v6 it gets power
to all four wheels via a pdk dual-clutch
automatic transmission
let's go for a drive the drivetrains a
bit of a sleeping giant in the panamera
4s there's a little bit of accelerator
lag at first and the transmission can
take a few moments kick down the highway
when you need it to there's regular
Sport and Sport Plus mode in our test
car in an all but Sport+ it actually
starts you off in second gear to which
is a little bit of a drag
once you left foot kind of past all that
panamera 4s is a pretty quick car
transmission shifts very very quickly
when it finally needs to it can go down
two or three years right away
pdk you could almost say stands for
pretty damn quick you know if you had
spelled quick with a cake
porsche upgraded the suspension Springs
and bushings for 2014 and there are four
possible suspension layouts i won't bore
you with all four but our car does kind
of have all the bells and whistles here
so an adaptive air suspension with
anti-roll technology the car corners
pretty well it doesn't drive like a
caiman or boxer doesn't rotate that
easily and the tail doesn't come out
quite as quickly as it does on the 911
but it does come free like a proper rear
drive cars should it's fun to play
around on curvy roads in the Panamera it
behaves like a proper sports sedan in
that way the Panamera starts right
around 80 thousand dollars that puts it
in territory with other technical
competitors like the audi s7 rs7 BMW
6-series gran coupe a but once you get
all the way up to the top trim levels of
pan-american be optioned out all the way
up to around 250,000 dollars that's a
huge spread for a car that really kind
of defies classification and that might
be why you can't wait to buy one or you
really can't stand it
you decide