Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT review

I’m told the UK allocation is ‘very small’, though I couldn’t get any exact numbers out of Porsche’s representative. At £150,500 it undercuts the Aston Martin DBX707 by almost £40,000, proving that in this sector of the market at least, a brand new Porsche can still be the skinflint’s choice.

The Cayenne’s cabin is a little austere with its dark finish and flat surfaces, but the quality is beyond reproach and with so much man made suede all over the place, including the grab handles by your knees, the steering wheel and the top of the gear selector, you are made to feel like you’re climbing into a very sporting car. The seats are brilliantly supportive, too, and cradle you so that you address the pedals and steering wheel as you would in a lower-set saloon car.

Even in the Normal driving mode, the 631bhp V8 has a sort of foreboding presence. In fact it makes itself known the moment you wake it from its slumber, the unique centre exit, part titanium exhaust sending a bassy V8 throb rocking through the entire car. It’s a rumble that becomes a roar when you bury the throttle, though you have to wait until 3000rpm for the turbos to spool up and 4000rpm for them to blow at full force, at which point the Turbo GT explodes forwards like it’s been fired from a cannon.

This car is a Swiss Army Knife with a sledgehammer that flips out on one side and a scalpel on the other. As you grip the wheel and feel your head being forced back towards the headrest, you sense through your fingertips a precision through the steering and an alertness in the chassis that you’ve rarely felt in any SUV before. I still can’t quite believe a car this tall and heavy can ferret its way along a tricky B-road so eagerly, or at such speed.

There is phenomenal cornering grip, at least in the dry, seemingly limitless body control – the Turbo GT doesn’t appear to roll in bends at all, never mind list like a torpedoed battleship – and under power there’s even a sense of the rear end driving the car crisply away from a corner. I had expected the ride to have gone to pieces, because surely very stiff springing is the only way to make something like this handle even moderately well. And there is some extra tension in the way the suspension deals with poor surfaces, but in Normal mode it remains serene and comfortable.

Porsche’s other new sporty SUV is the four-cylinder Macan T, which along with the Turbo GT book-ends the company’s performance 4x4s. Not far off a third of the price and with much less than half the power, the Macan T is smaller, lower and lighter by 355kg. I reckoned it would be sharper to drive than the Turbo GT, but it just isn’t.

In fact, the Cayenne is far more entertaining to drive quickly, which suggests that nowadays clever chassis hardware and deft tuning trump inherent rightness – the old virtues that we’ve trumpeted for so long, like a low centre of gravity and lightness, have apparently been made redundant. At least for this kind of car.

But I’m still not persuaded by vehicles like the Cayenne Turbo GT. I mean, who needs their luxury SUV to be fun to drive? Will Turbo GT drivers get up at 5am and head into the hills to have the roads to themselves? I’m quite sure the vast majority of buyers would be better served by a more comfort-minded and much cheaper Cayenne, perhaps a plug-in hybrid model that could slip discreetly through town.

But I know why this car exists and I’m not at all mad that it does. Besides, it drives so much like a more conventional high-performance Porsche they could fix a ‘2’ to the end of its name and I wouldn’t have too many questions.