Sea Salt And Cayenne
by Mike Grundon (30 Jul 04)

Life isn’t likely to get much better than this, I thought, as I swept down the hill and across the River Tamar into Cornwall. All the elements were there - a warm and star-studded night, an empty road to the coast, all three of my children around me, two weeks of holiday ahead of me, Bob Harris on the radio and a big-engined Porsche under us.

Easing down on the pedal to get a run up the far side of the valley, the six-speed automatic box almost imperceptibly dropped a cog and the needle on the tacho skipped up a few notches. The 2.2-tonne vehicle surged up the hill, its clear white headlamps pushing back the darkness. Jeff Finlin was singing Moonlight becomes the Dawn and I was thinking of times past. I was smiling.
       
Ever since I was 12 I’ve liked Porsches - they’ve always had a sort of clean, no-nonsense, solid look about them that appealed to me, but few have ever looked as solid as this car I was in now.

It was the Cayenne S, a luxury four-wheel drive car that suffers something of an identity crisis. It so wants to be a sports car and has performance to burn the majority of cars from a standing start, but it also has the size and practicality of a Range-Rover. It has fired up controversy over its looks, coming across as an inflated 911 front end grafted onto a VW Touareg tail, but I’m going to stick my neck out now and say it works for me - and if you haven’t seen one in the flesh yet, reserve judgement until you do.

The S version is the middle sister of the three Cayenne options. It has a 4.5 litre-V8 petrol engine which turns out a massive 340bhp and equally excessive 311lb/ft of torque. The bottom line is that despite weighing over 2¼ tonnes it will still leap up to 62mph in just 7.2 seconds, and makes a lovely throaty warble when doing it.

I didn’t take the kids when I gave the beast a good work-out a couple of days later. The first thing to do was to read the manual - there’s a skip-load of gadgets and settings to play with, and there is no point in waiting to explore them when you’re on the run. Forewarned and forearmed, I approached the car, touched the door handle and the locks instantly sprang open. The hands-free blipper (rather bulky and perhaps childishly fashioned into the general shape of a small car) was still tucked in my pocket and out of sight. Thirty seconds later, it took some dancing in the front seat to get the switchblade-operated ignition key out of my jeans to turn the thing on.

Climate control takes charge of everything, using the air conditioning when needed to reach the temperature you’ve dialled into the system so you have to hit the Economy button to turn it off, if you want to come even close to the projected average nineteen miles from a gallon of fuel. The electrically adjusted seat with inflatable lumbar support, and the electric mirrors, find you the ideal driving position. Then, after selecting D on the autobox and dropping the foot-operated parking brake, you surge out into the world.

More . . .

Back to Porsche Road Test index
Back to main Road Test index