Pan-Am Jumbo
PORSCHE PANAMERA 4 E-HYBRID
£83,720
FOR Supremely refined, now a bit Porschier to drive AGAINST It’s the company car deluxe, not the one you want
Why exactly, you might sensibly wonder, has Porsche bothered facelifting the Panamera plug-in hybrid, eking out battery capacity and tweaking its handling? Now the Taycan’s here, surely the big Pan-Am is last week’s news?
Porsche insists the Panamera and Taycan couldn’t be more different: one is a luxury long-distance GT that majors on lounging space and continental range. The other is deliberately smaller and sportier.
A Panamera driver will schlep longer distances. People travel in the back seats more of the time. In some countries, EVs are now very desirable, very cutting edge. In others, you still need a petrol engine to be taken seriously.
So there you have it. Porsche is a loveydovey happy family, with a four-door supercar for everyone. For how long?
In the meantime, where there was once a 14.1kWh battery now lives 17.9kWh, though due to improvements in battery chemistry it’s only 1.5kg heavier than the old cell pack. Great!
The battery pack and associated gubbins heap 300kg onto the already portly Panamera. Ah. Porsche promises 30 per cent more e-range, apparently. With an ambient temperature of a couple of Celsius, the fully charged big-P offered 25–28 miles of e-range, which fell to 23–25 miles when the heater and bum warmers were cranked up. Mmm, toasty.
But you’re shelling out £83k for a petrolelectric Porsche. You’ll expect a hotted-up drive too, else you’d get an Audi, or a Tesla.
The Panamera 4 e-Hybrid has a go, but the V6 still sounds reedy even with the optional sports exhaust uncorked, and the quantity of punch doesn’t seem to build with a linear squeeze of the throttle. You have to wait before it surges forward. Scroll through the modes and it rolls its eyes like a teenage daughter listening to dad jokes. “Ugh, really..?”
What’s more, because it’s actually fairly economical – we saw 35mpg in Hybrid Auto mode, which climbed past 40mpg with some electric-only town running – deploying Sport Plus mode and clogging it feels weirdly... inappropriate. The display guilt-trips you as economy plummets into the 20s.
This member of the four-door family isn’t the one that enthusiastic driver folk will crave, but it swallows up a hefty chunk of Panamera sales, chipping in for the roll-cage-and-stickers unicorns. It’s more cohesive to drive than older plug-ins, but the faster 4S e-Hybrid (not to mention the GTS and Turbo) are the ones we still want... while we still can.