Putting performance first
Ride quality is excellent in this retuned luxury gas-electric hybrid SUV
MONTPELLIER, FRANCE— You might well wonder why anybody who could afford a $90,000 vehicle would care about fuel consumption.
But I guess people who can afford $90,000 vehicles didn’t get that rich by throwing their money away. Which may help explain the Porsche Cayenne E-Hybrid.
The Porsche SUV is now on sale in an E-Hybrid version, starting at a lofty $91,700, $16,200 more than the non-hybrid. You could buy a lot of unleaded premium for that.
The E-Hybrid is powered by essentially the same 335-horsepower, 3.0-litre turbocharged V6 that motivates the base Cayenne, augmented by an electric motor rated at 134 hp, although the two numbers aren’t exactly additive. Total system output is given as 455 hp.
The electric motor is embedded with the transmission — an eight-speed torque converter Tiptronic, not the dualclutch PDK you’ll find in other Porsches. Full-time fourwheel-drive is standard.
The battery sits under the luggage compartment floor so neatly that you’d never know it was there unless you lifted up the carpeted floorboard.
It does eliminate some underfloor storage space, reducing seats-up capacity from 770 to 645 litres, but I doubt many Cayenne owners will complain. In all, a remarkably neat installation.
The payoff should be at the fuel pump, but early fuel ratings don’t show that dramatic an improvement over the previous Cayenne hybrid. This appears to be due to the fact Porsche has tuned this one for better performance rather than ultimate fuel consumption. It will probably still get somewhere on 3 to 4 litres per 100 kilometres in normal city driving, which is pretty darned good for a 2,295-kilogram truck.
What’s even more impressive is that if you didn’t really know which model of Cayenne you were driving, and of course didn’t look at the myriad of dashboard displays on the available screens, you might not even know you were in a hybrid.
Floor it and the vehicle will scoot from zero to 100 km/h in 5.0 seconds, which is quick by any standard, about 1.2 seconds quicker than the non-hybrid V6 Cayenne. And because the electric motor develops its peak torque from the push of the pedal, it feels even quicker than that.
You can run your E-Hybrid in one of five modes. E-Power, as you might expect, runs on the battery for as long as it lasts. Hybrid Auto switches to gasoline as needed. Sport leaves the engine always running, with the battery remaining available for extra spurts of acceleration. Sport Plus brings every milliwatt of available electro-motion to the party, cranks turbo boost up and primes the transmission for sportier shifts.
There’s also something called E-Launch, which is kind of like launch control in a gas-engined car. If the battery is full, you can hold both the accelerator and brake pedals down hard, release the brake, and you will get a silent all-electric sprint that yields a 0-100 km/h time of 6.3 seconds. Sort of a party trick for electric car fans.
This is the third shot Porsche has taken at a hybrid Cayenne. What is most impressive about this one is how seamless it is.
On the road, the Cayenne won’t exactly remind you of the 911 that’s probably stored back in your garage. It is more than competent, probably among the better-handling SUVs, but it still weighs in at that 2,295-kg mark.
The seats are comfy, front and rear, and everything is beautifully finished.
If you drive the Cayenne E-Hybrid gently — i.e., no E-Launches — you’ll run out of juice after about 44 km. Harder acceleration, colder weather, using the heater or other accessories, will cut that back.
If most of your driving is done in town, that might be all you need and the E-Hybrid might be worth the extra cost over a conventional model.
But once you’re in gasoline- only mode, you have that 3.0litre V6 engine pushing around an extra 310 kg of dead weight. So if you do much highway driving, you won’t be saving much fuel and a different Cayenne model might better fill yer boots.
It’s horses for courses — pick the Cayenne that fits your driving regimen.