Right now you’re looking at the front of a Porsche Cayenne and unless you happen to
be the bloke who designed the thing, you might be wondering, is that the new one or is that the old
one? Now have a look at the rear, yep, it’s the new one: the all new Porsche Cayenne.
You can tell, can’t you, by that strip, that really sharp strip they’ve got running
across the rear, that this is the brand new car, the 3rd generation Cayenne and in fact
it’s much more different to the previous car than the front end styling would suggest,
it is all new. The structure is now a hybrid mix of alloy and steel, so it’s a bit lighter
than before. We’re not messing about today, this is the Cayenne Turbo, the really fast
one. Power is up by 30 horsepower to 550 but the engine is now 4 litres rather than a 4.8
- that’s downsizing in action. And so the turbos are mounted within the V, they call
it a hot V, it makes a huge amount of difference, I’ll come back to that a little bit later
on. So we’ve still got an 8 speed automatic gearbox, it’s not a twin clutch, still got
the four wheel drive system, we’ve still got super trick Porsche Stability Management.
There’s all sorts of new tech on this car but before I start describing what it does
to the driving experience, let’s park up and let’s have a little poke around this
cabin because there’s a lot going on with this new interior.
All new inside the cabin of course, it kind of looks familiar from the previous Cayenne but it is all new in
here and I have to say the quality is really, really good. The material quality, the build
quality, it just feels solid in here. All based around this massive central screen here
now which is huge, kind of the size of a loaf of bread. All the graphics are beautifully
rendered and we’ve got the navigation screen up, the map is enormous. Then right in front
of me in the instrument pinnacle front and centre we’ve got the rev counter, that’s
typical Porsche fair, that’s what they always do. Then, to the right I’ve got another
digital screen, the size of a typical navigation screen and I can have my map up there, I can
have all sorts of car info. Yeah that works really, really nicely. Steering wheel where I want
it, reaches all the way out to me. It’s a good seating position, lofty with a good
view forwards. Yeah, it’s a really cool cabin this and then in the menu system here
we can look at all the off road settings so gravel, mud, sand, rocks, it should be able
to get through some pretty tough terrain I think, this car. But let’s find out how
it actually drives on a proper winding country road. Now the cars really, really good on
a motorway, on a long journey. I’ve already driven it on that kind of road and it’s
comfortable, it’s refined. In town, apart from the size of the thing it’s really easy
to drive so we’re up on this country road up in the Scottish borders to find out if
the things actually entertaining to drive, I mean it’s a hugely powerful Porsche Turbo,
it's got to be fun to drive, hasn’t it? So this car's got a couple of optional extras
that really make a big difference to the driving experience, the first one is rear wheel steering,
that makes the car more agile at low speeds, more maneuverable, you have to use less steering
lock and then it makes the car more stable at higher speeds. This car also has an active
roll stabilisation system, now the previous Cayenne did as well, Porsche dynamic chassis
control but that was a hydraulic-based system, this is a new electric-based system built
around this very powerful 48V electrical architecture that this car now uses, that means it’s
much more responsive, much more immediate and therefore more effective. I have to say
it makes all the difference. The problem with these huge, heavy, high-riding SUV’s
is that they naturally roll a lot and so you’ve got two options, you can either fight that
roll with an anti roll bar the size of your arm, and stop in from leaning but then you
knacker the ride quality. Or you fit one of these very clever, electric roll stabilization
systems which is what this car has. The impression you get when you drive along a winding road
is that the body is actually staying really, really flat. It’s kind of a spooky sensation
in a car that sits so high that you expect would be rolling around all over the place.
So what they’ve done is decouple that roll stabilisation from the ride quality so we’ve
got a flat bodied vehicle and we’ve got a really, really good ride and I mean a really
good ride. So, I’m in the softest damper setting at the moment and it’s really plush,
it’s really pliant, it’s not a stiff, hard-riding, jagged kind of thing, it’s
really fluid. That’s really, really impressive, I have to say. That is probably the biggest
improvement they’ve made to this car over the previous one. The cars on three chamber
air springs which is where that plush ride comes from, it's also got Porsche torque vectoring
plus and to get the most out of that system, it uses mixed tyres front and rear. Wider
on the rear axle than the front. On this particular car, those tyres are Pirelli PZero’s: performance
biased road tyres. This car has lots of proper off roading hardware, it's got diff locks
and adjustable ride height and various terrain settings. That means it's got some pretty good
off roading capability but of course, away from the road it’s completely compromised
by the tyres it’s on. These super high performance SUV’s are kind of fundamentally at odds
with themselves because if you want them to be sharp and agile on the road, you need high
performance tyres, if you want them to be good off road, you need to put on completely
different tyres and that knackers its performance on the road. So the tyres that this cars got
on, they’re not going to drag you through mud of even across wet fields, what they do
do is make this car freakishly agile and fast along a road. It’s 2.2 tonnes so it’s
still a big hefty chunky thing, massive ride height of course and the only reason they’ve
been able to make this thing as agile and actually as entertaining to drive is because
they’ve got all these systems. The roll stabilisation, the rear wheel steering, the
torque vectoring. This car’s just loaded with hardware and all that hardwares trying
to do is overcome the size and the weight of the thing. Of course, even with all that
hardware doing its thing, the Cayenne turbo never feels as agile or as locked down or
as nimble as a proper sports car but what you do have is precision. You’ve got massive
body control, good grip, even in these wet conditions. The roads are quite slippery but
we’ve still got good grip and that is where its massive point to point pace on a road
comes from. You could frighten some properly quick hot hatches in this car I think. What
we don’t have is any sort of steering feel, I mean that’s probably expecting too much
from a car like this, isn't it? So on a day like this where the roads are a bit greasy, you are just
guessing how much grip there is, there’s no intuitive sense of how much grip you have
which is, I suppose that’s completely fair enough. But what you can do is place the car
exactly where you want it, there’s no play in the steering and it’s super direct and
precise so you can put the car exactly where you want it which really helps you get along
the road really quickly. Talking of going really quickly, this new engine, 4-litre twin
turbo V8, 550 horsepower, 568lb-ft of torque. We’ve got second gear and you’re about
to watch the camera man fly to the back of the car. Yes, that’s big, big performance.
It’s a very, very heavy car but 550 horsepower and 568lb ft of torque shunts it along the
road really, really quickly. It’s got proper Porsche turbo thumping performance and this
new engine is very, very impressive. I think it’s lost some of the thunderous V8 soundtrack
that we had with the old 4.8-litre engine but what we do now have is freakishly sharp
throttle response. Almost no turbo lag. If you didn’t know better, you might even believe
that this was a normally aspirated, very high capacity engine, it’s seriously good. It
isn’t as thrilling or as engaging to drive as a proper sports car or even a sports saloon
but I can forgive it that. It’s a huge, high-riding, heavy SUV and the fact that it’s
as capable as it is along a twisting road is massively impressive. It costs a whisker
under £100,000, so it’s big, big money and then of course this car's got ceramic
brakes, it’s got rear wheel steering, it’s got the roll stabilisation system so you’re
looking at £120,000-£130,000. Big, big money, but I have to say it’s an incredibly impressive package.