Porsche’s big and bulky dream drive
It’s big, it’s bulky – and utterly fabulous to drive. But does anyone need a sports car as huge as this?
If you have a cat, could you do me a favour please? Would you be so kind as to give it some cream, take a photo and then send it to me so I can see if it’s expression came anywhere close to mine during the following phone call.
‘Hi Chris, would you be at all interested in flying out to Rome to record an interview with Daniel Craig while they film the big car chase for the new Bond movie,
Spectre?’
Cough, splutter, choke, swoon, faint, thud.
The answer was, of course, ‘Yes.’ All they have to do now is point me in the direction of the broken glass I need to crawl over and I’m their man.
Talk about perks of the job. I promise I will be nothing but gorgeous to everyone about everything for the rest of the year.
Look, watch and listen to see if I’m not.
Of course, there is always a degree of tact required when sharing news as monumental as this back home. Especially when it involves a private audience with 007, my eldest son’s absolute hero of all time, and doubly so when the encounter is due to take place in the very city my wife and I agreed over Christmas is our ultimate date weekend destination. Damn you, Bond. Cut to two conversations on day one of driving this week’s test car, the Porsche Panamera GTS.
‘Daddy, can I press the “sport plus” button please?’
‘Yes son, as many times as you like. And you do know how much I love you, don’t you?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘Because I’m going to interview your favourite person in the world and you can’t come.’ ‘You mean Spider-Man?’ Phew, one down, one to go... ‘Babe, can I borrow the Panamera this week to go into town?’ asked Tash later that day.
‘As many times as you like till it has to go back, sweetheart. And you do know how much I love you, don’t you?’ ‘Yes, why?’ ‘Because I might have to go to Rome to do an interview and it’s a no-downtime, full-on work thing.’
‘Oh right, where and why? Who’s it with?’
‘Er – squeak – not sure yet, they haven’t told me all the details. Squirm...’
So as Rome, Bond and the jawdroppingly beautiful Aston Martin DB10 loom excitingly on the horizon, I won’t deny I’m finding it difficult to think of anything else. So quickly, let’s roll out a chunk of opinion on this massive German thingy from Porsche before I lose focus.
First, like all Panameras before her, she looks stupidly big, like she’s hiding a normal-size car underneath a joke body.
The flat matt red doesn’t help matters either. The same goes for the unapologetically super-scaled interior. It’s as if Porsche started with the driver and then just screamed, ‘charge – ergonomics or die’.
There’s no denying everything is to hand exactly where one would want it to be, the only problem being that Porsche seems to have just left it at that, which means the interior layout of the car spreads out like a broken yolk giving birth to one list of requirements after another.
Perhaps this is why we end up with not one clock but three. Yes, that’s right, three that surround the driver. Does anyone really need to know the time that much? Especially when the clock on the sat-nav lags annoyingly one minute behind the other two. This car has also somehow ended up with three windscreen-washer clusters consisting of no less than nine washer jets.
And it wasn’t just me who was struck by these inexplicable idiosyncrasies. Tash pointed out the rear doors are so light they struggle to shut due to a lack of momentum. Then there was the top-slot-loading CD player, which I loved, but Tash thought looked more Nineties’ Nissan than top-notch, state-ofthe-art, present-day Porsche. And no reversing camera as standard. Are we sure – for a car that comes in at more than €170,000?
But the most annoying aspect of this Porschesaurus Maximus for me was the fact that the wing mirrors, which automatically dip when you select reverse to help avoid kerbing the rather gorgeous lightweight alloy wheels, subsequently take about a week to revert to their normal position.
Not such an issue... until you go to select a forward gear, begin to pull out and look across to see nothing but the tarmac beneath you instead
of the rush hour queuing up to give you a right royal rear-ending.
However, all of the above notwithstanding (as well as ignoring those periods when the fuel gauge seemed to register gallons to the mile rather than miles to the gallon), I loved driving the Porsche Panamera GTS. She is absolutely fabulous. She sounds awesome, she is supreme through the PDX gearbox, in both manual or fully automatic, and she handles superbly with grip to die for.
She’s lower slung than the other models in the range (10mm to be precise), with self-levelling air suspension and bigger brakes. Regardless of her tank-like dimensions, I had fun the whole time I was in her.
I did, however, spend most of that time wondering who on earth this car is aimed at. I could only conclude it’s for absolute Porsche nuts who cannot bear to even contemplate being in any other make of vehicle.
Why else would anyone in their right mind willingly hand over a small fortune for a gargantuan luxury tourer full of atypical Porsche anomalies with a minuscule boot yet so much space inside that each passenger is in their own time zone? I’ll leave that one with you. I’m off to brush up on my Italian and figure out what item of furniture to hide behind when I finally come clean with my wife over the identity of a certain secret agent I am due to interrogate. ‘Do you expect me to talk, Tash?’ ‘No, Mr Evans, I expect you to die...’