New Porsche Cayenne is hot, hot, hot

Porsche has spiced up its SUV and the result is super-fast, super-expensive ... and super-fun

I’m off to The Chelsea Flower Show tomorrow. Although when I say I’m off there, technically I’ll beworking.TohelpRadio2 celebrate its 50th anniversary, those good eggs at the Royal Horticultural Society have given us five plots at the show to create five mood gardens. Each of which has been created and curated by a combo of on-air talent and greenfingered geniuses who actually know what they’re doing.

Yet it’s difficult to imagine better value for money in this ever more profligate world than a packet of seeds. Just the briefest of mooches around our local garden centre recently bore testament to this very fact. Tell me where you can get a better bang for your buck than €2.50 for a pack of giant sunflower seeds.

Kids love sunflowers. Our boys are currently in the throes of a school competition to nurture the tallest sunflower before the summer break. I was revelling in the innocence of all this outdoors derring-do as we wandered out into the garden en famille to check on their efforts last Monday evening. The fresh air, the gentle rustle of the wind in the trees, the chirping of various birds hiding in hedgerows. And then all of a sudden... BOOM!

‘What the dickens was that?’ screamed Mrs Evans, in slightly more colourful language. More booms followed, as did more of her colourful protestations. ‘I think that’s probably the new Porsche Cayenne Turbo S being delivered,’ I said. It was. Oops.

Here we have a car that redefines ridiculousness. Sure, there are many ridiculous cars nowadays, except that the Cayenne Turbo S is different, in as much as you can buy an entry-level Cayenne – which is still 100% a Cayenne – for less than half what this monster costs.

And so what does one get for more than double that price? Double everything with a cherry on top? Er, no. That is not how the financial model in the world of luxury motor cars works. You still only get four wheels, one engine and the same number of doors. The overage represents a mystical value reached via a completely illogical mathematical equation. Great fun, though.

And this is the point. You can’t put a price on fun, goes the saying. Which of course is hogwash: you can and most people do. Porsche has even put a price on all the brand-new Turbo S fun available and that is £119,720 (€140,000 plus VRT upon import here).

So how on earth do we get from £53,000 for a standard Cayenne to King Kong here? The headline attributes are: 4.3-litre twin turbo V8 engine, dynamic chassis control and leather two-tone interior. Although other lovely luxuries like sports exhaust system, tinted LED tail lights and four-zone climate control hike up the total on-the-road price to a whopping £129,303.

For all the money you also get a car that is an incredibly loud, incredibly agile, incredibly fast and incredibly attractive – attractive, that is, if flamboyant chairs and flares cause you to become excited in all the right places.

You also get seats that are huge, even in the back. A huge gauge count. And a huge switch count (there are switches everywhere – too many perhaps). Yet among all this hugeness sits what seems a tiny infotainment screen.

On the road, this is a car that knows only how to roar. Even with the least-aggressive Comfort driving mode selected, roaring is standard. The residents of Ascot High Street could have been forgiven for thinking Heathrow’s third runway had been opened a decade early. It was so embarrassing. As was pulling away from a standing start, regardless of who or what I was pulling away from, I couldn’t help but put my foot

down. I looked and sounded like a right saddo but I didn’t care. This car is brilliant to drive.

As for Sport and Sport Plus modes, they are the next two notches on a bonkers scale you will have long since passed simply by turning on the ignition. When it comes to acceleration, this beast is the explosive polar opposite to last week’s lifeless Nissan Micra. Underneath the go-faster pedal lies a bottomless pit of jet propulsion begging to be jettisoned into the ether.

The Turbo S gives you 50 more horsepower than the standard Turbo. Which may be one of several reasons the brakes are absolutely massive. If you’re not on the gas, the chances are you’ll need to be on the anchors. The power comes on stream in a flash and just keeps on coming. The steering is typically assured, accurate, perfectly weighted and responsive, as one would expect from a high-performance Porsche – and the handling is bordering on insane. For an SUV. Although not quite as insane as the magnificent Bentley Bentayga. Which, for some reason I didn’t feel quite as silly in. That particular pack of dynamite, though, costs almost a hundred grand again.

Now look where we’ve gone and ended up – in true Looney Tunes territory. I’m lost now. You try to figure out what’s going on.

I’ve got to come back down to earth in time to get to Hospital Road for 5am tomorrow. Remember, one must make time to smell the flowers. But then again, the Cayenne Turbo S is officially an off-road 4x4, so I suppose, technically, I could combine the two.

Best not though, eh? That said, if any of those lovely Chelsea pensioners want to nip out for a cheeky quick half. I’ll be happy to play chauffeur – it will be the quickest half of their lives.