Porsche’s Driving Experience Centre features a fearsome “Kick Plate” – a remote-controlled, moveable metal plate which is triggered to simulate the effect of a loss of rear-wheel traction. It lies flush with the ground and is hidden by a film of water. Beyond it lies 50m of roadway coated with material that offers as much traction as a frozen lake. As I pass over the Kick Plate, it hurls the Porsche Panamera that I am driving sideways. Hopelessly slow at catching the slide, I need all of that 50m to bring almost two tonnes of rotating car to a halt.
A few minutes later, on what looks like normal tarmac running through a series of bends on this test circuit, Porsche’s first-ever four-door, four-seater is sideways again. This time, however, the surface is more forgiving. Yes, it is extremely slippery, even though dry. But there is enough grip to make the slide and correcting it pure fun, much like driving a championship rally car on gravel.
Whether you like the look of the Panamera or not – and some have suggested that its rear end might have been inspired by Jennifer Lopez – nobody can deny that Porsche takes the maxim “try before you buy” seriously. The track we are on might be only a few metres from Stowe corner on Silverstone’s grand prix circuit, but it is wholly separate, contained within the multi-million pound centre Porsche has built on land leased from the British Racing Drivers’ Club. Despite its several kilometres of tracks, this is not a competition venue. Its role is to sharpen the skills of existing or aspirant Porsche owners, as well as provide some fun and a deeper sense of involvement with the brand.
It is also rather a good place – in combination, later, with 100 miles or so of driving on mediocre Midlands back roads and a stretch of the M1 – to test Porsche’s claim to be pioneering a new market segment with the Panamera.
It is, insists Michael Steiner, director of the Panamera product line, fixing me with the confident gaze of one who will brook no argument, “a four-seater sports car with the comfort of a luxury saloon”. Annoyingly, he turns out to be right. But whether it really is a new market sector is open to debate. Bring good, sexy looks into the equation – not unreasonable, surely, with such expensive cars – and the claim looks rather dubious. The glorious Maserati Quattroporte is already on the market, and the most seductive sports-car-like four-door, four-seater ever, the Aston Martin Rapide, is scheduled to go on sale next year.
Engineers developing the Panamera had what Steiner calls a “blank sheet of paper”. The engine is at the front, despite a boot section that looks remarkably like an overgrown version of the iconic rear-engined 911 sports car. Not having to share its basic engineering platform with anything else in the Porsche range has allowed the Panamera’s designers to seat the occupants very low in the car and so avoid the loftier, “three-box” shape of conventional but equally powerful “super-saloons” such as BMW’s M5, Jaguar’s XFR and the Mercedes-Benz CLS 63AMG. By choosing such a long wheelbase, they have managed to achieve inordinate quantities of both leg and headroom for the four occupants – there can be no more than four, since a centre console runs the length of the car’s interior, making the two rear seats as individual and supportive as those in front. (The rear seats also fold down if the already capacious boot needs to be further extended.)
And the seats need to be supportive because, given its head and suitably aggressive settings for suspension, accelerator and gear change (optional air suspension can also drop the car even lower to the ground), the Panamera responds with something close to the eagerness and dynamic fluidity of the 911. Very few cars of two tonnes would have fared anything like so well in the testing conditions of the Experience Centre.
It is out on the M1 and the restless, winding, mediocre-surfaced minor highways of the Midlands, however, that the Panamera surprises the most. Good though the 911 is dynamically, no one could ever truthfully describe a long journey in one as restful. It reacts to every jiggle of road surface, and tyre noise is constantly in the background. Set the Panamera’s suspension to “comfort”, however, and the seven-speed gearbox in fully automatic mode, and the car’s character changes to that of refined, relaxed grand tourer. (Drivers should leave Porsche’s idiosyncratic and annoyingly counter-intuitive F1-style manual gear change “paddles” well alone.)
There is an awful lot of guff talked and written about bigger wheels, lower-profile tyres and the “sport” and “sport plus” settings available on cars such as the Panamera, which already enjoy high performance. The marketing men love it – the profit margin on a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of extra large, sculpted alloy wheels is gargantuan. But off the race track, in the real world of potholes, bumps and surface heaves, all this talk is mostly nonsense. The Panamera is so enormously capable even in “comfort” mode that the main effect of switching to sportier settings is merely to guarantee a more uncomfortable and restless ride.
The car comes in three versions: the entry-level, two-wheel drive Panamera S with a naturally aspirated 4.8 litre V8, starting at £72,000; the 4S (same power, but with standard semi-automatic PDK gearbox and four-wheel-drive) at £77,000; and the near-500bhp Turbo at £95,000. The Turbo’s mighty 517lbs ft of torque helps lift it into true supercar territory, in spite of its bulk. Standstill to 62mph flashes up in four seconds dead. Only when the speedometer is nudging 190mph does it run out of puff.
Be warned, however: buyers will find it all too easy to run up £15,000 in optional extras, particularly in the alluring atmosphere of a Silverstone “experience” day.
.....................
The details
Porsche’s pioneer
How much
£72,000 (entry level Panamera S) to £95,000 (Turbo). All before extras
How fast
0-62mph 5.3 secs/176mph (S); 4 secs/187mph (Turbo)
How thirsty
26.2-23.2 mpg on EU combined test cycle
How green
253-286g CO2/km
Also consider
Maserati Quattroporte, from £83,200
