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Porsche Panamera review
£79,500 – £142,119
“The forgotten Porsche gets modernised. You shouldn’t forget it”
Good stuff
Amazing active suspension, well-integrated hybrid powertrain, style
Bad stuff
Rear is tight for adults, base V6 not very quick
What is it?
Here’s a new generation of the Porsche Panamera. As before it’s a slinky-looking front-engined sports car with space for four adults, and a decent hatchback boot. What’s new is a body redesign and an astonishing active – not adaptive, active – suspension system on the Turbo E-Hybrid.
Is it just us or is the Panamera a car that’s unfairly ignored? It’s surely the last car anyone thinks of when playing word-association with “Porsche”. People like us would mention the 911 or Cayman or Boxster, and then the high-profile Taycan EV. The rest of the world will think of the big-selling SUVs.
Cars with few rivals sometimes do get forgotten, and sure enough the Panam has few rivals. It’s not a hotted-up saloon or estate. And anyway the BMW M5 and AMG E63 or Audi RS6 are absent between generations at the time of this review. It shares a platform with the Bentley Flying Spur, but it’s more agile than that. Maybe the closest rival is the Mercedes-AMG GT four-door.
The rest of the world might forget the Panamera but Porsche hasn’t. It’s back and it’s both more dynamic and more comfortable than ever.
So what’s new?
The active suspension is top of the bill, so we’ll get to it later.
Opening act is a redesign, but it’s subtle – an acoustic set, if you will. The nose is more sharply defined and the headlamps squarer. Around the back, the light cluster is a simpler rule across entire tail. The third side window now has a kink in its outline. Not so Porsche, that. Inside is a new dash, with more screens and touchpad controls.
Next on stage, amping things up, is the powertrain. The hybrid’s battery is bigger and the whole system is itself given a gee-up – in combination with the V8 petrol engine, the Turbo E-Hybrid swings with 680bhp and four-wheel drive.
The E-Hybrid 4 and E-Hybrid 4S have been given a similar electric boost, resulting in 470bhp and 544bhp total, both with a V6.
The Panamera and Panamera 4 meanwhile get improvements to the V6 for 353bhp. They have conventional air suspension with adaptive dampers.
But under it all, the platform, much sheetmetal and even the doors are carried over from the existing car. Which we liked very much anyway. Sadly, our bodystyle of choice, the Sport Turismo quasi-estate, is deceased. Never found a global audience apparently.
You seem eager to talk about this funky suspension…
While the car’s weight is supported on air springs, all the actual springing is done by a set of oil actuators, one for each wheel, that also replace the shock absorbers and anti-roll bars.
Get out of the car for a minute and imagine you’re standing on a platform that’s randomly bouncing, tilting and pitching. You keep your head and body steady by using your muscles and balance system, flexing your knees and ankles. You relax your muscles as the platform pushes either of your feet up, and you tense them to extend your foot as it goes down. All the time you’re using your balance sensors (in your ear) to keep track of the horizon and the accelerations, and your sense of touch to know where your feet are and what dynamic weight they bear at any moment.
The Porsche has a balance system, accelerometers, position sensors and actuators to do the same job. And so like you it can actively stabilise its upper body while making the wheels follow the road. Not as well as you can, but for a car it’s spectacularly good.
It has two main behaviours, depending on the drive mode you selected. In sport and sport plus, it tries to keep the car level, killing roll, pitch and dive. That keeps the tyres dead upright on the road and the body stable, for maximum agility and grip. It also lowers the ride height.
Read More https://www.topgear.com/car-reviews/porsche/panamera
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