Panamera: Is this really Porsche?

18 Nov 2009

Muntaser Mirkar returns from his blazing drive inside Porsche's latest four-door, four-seat tarmac scorcher - with the answer to this million-dollar question...

Open road. 500 horsepower. 779 Nm of torque. No speed cameras in sight. Perfect.

Mass, Hysteria!

The first time you give in to the itch in your brain and the flutter in your heart as your right shoe sole goes from gently resting against the accelerator pedal to having depressed it hard all the way beyond the kick-down to the stop, the title of this article becomes totally redundant. Your eyes try to stay focused as tears of joy mixed with bouts of excitement and anxiety blur the view from the large front windscreen. Involuntarily you grip the leather wrapped steering wheel a little tighter with every passing unit on the Panamera's speedometer - which gives pride of place at the centre of the instrument console to the rather large rev-counter - just the way it should be in any true-blue sportscar. The way you get pushed back into the driver's seat is better left to be experienced than to be described in words as the Porsche Panamera Turbo accelerates from 0 to 100 km/h in just a shade over 4 seconds.

Then, as the car shifts up through the lower gears, the front starts to go light - the wheel goes free and you glance into the rear view mirror ? shaped to mock the outline of the rear windscreen. And that's when it really hits you - that the car you're driving isn't a small, agile and nimble lightweight sportscar, but in true essence a grand tourer that seats four and weighs almost 2 tonnes! But then again, don't glance at the rear view mirror, concentrate on the superiorly stylish dash and the plethora of buttons at your disposal and you'll probably feel like you're just as well in a Porsche 911 - a rather large Porsche 911 actually.

Design.

Now that design brief sounds rather simple but ask Michael Mauer, Design Chief at Porsche AG and his team and they'll tell you a completely different story - one that is both intriguing and enticing to hear. Every car maker has a design philosophy that dictates what their products look like - sort of a gene pool to tap into so all the siblings look similar and identify with the parents. Porsche has one too - which is why the moment you look at a Boxster, Cayman and even the Cayenne, you know that's a Porsche. It's more of a history than a design direction at Porsche - right from when Ferdinand Porsche and his son Ferry gave the world what has now become the most practical sportscar on the globe to the brand new Panamera. The basic rules have stayed the same and have offered a quick reference guide to young designers aspiring to pen the next Porsche for all these years. But Mauer and his team didn?t have a simple job at hand. The Panamera may still have the same kind of curvy bonnet, front end and swooping roof line flowing smoothly into the boot, but adapting all of that to the dimensions of a four seat car the size of the Panamera requires more than just creativity - it asks for resilience and perseveration too - especially in the light of criticism from Porsche purists about the car's very existence. Just like it was when the Cayenne was first shown to the world, isn't it?

Lessons were well learnt from the Cayenne and what the Panamera has turned out to be is the perfect mix between the size of the big SUV and the svelte of the flagship 911 sportscar. Pictures may not do justice to the Panamera, but spot one in real life and the youngest baby from the Stuttgart stables has the same flair as its other stablemates - the kind that makes you want to cry tears of joy when you see it drive past. What's on the outside translates even better on the inside in the Panamera. The first thing you notice besides the Porsche logo on the steering wheel is the array of meters just beyond - with the tachometer forming the central and largest display. The general layout of the cabin remains typically Porsche in all its shapes and colours, but what you see with the Panamera is a new philosophy at Porsche AG - these Germans don't believe in complicated single dial joysticks with complicated menus for accessing all the various systems in your car. Their approach is simple - give everything a dedicated button of its own, group the safety, ergonomics and chassis functions together in their own private places so when you want to access something specific, all you have to do is look, identify the button and press it - just once, instead of playing around with a joystick for minutes on end and your concentration on the screen. At first, the new approach looks a tad cluttered with enough buttons to earn the Panamera's cabin credentials of a private jet's cockpit! But as you start driving and using the functions one after the other, the sheer brilliance of the whole arrangement simply blows you away.