Test driving a new Porsche is like interviewing Haifa Wehbe. You’re already excited before even seeing the car and when you do, you have to concentrate hard not to lose focus on content over form.
Rule #1: Don’t get overexcited. Of course, the car will be gorgeous, of course, the interior will be refined, and of course, the engineering will be top-notch. From a German luxury car maker like Porsche we expect nothing less than Teutonic quality and precision. You just need to remember this when you sit in the Porsche Cayenne and look at the perfect finish of the interior, maybe comparing it to your own car at home. Then you turn on the engine, play around with the seat’s lumbar support and think “Mmmm …” — before you’ve even moved an inch, the car has already captivated you.
Rule #2: Start slow, don’t rush anything. Unless you’re a trained sports car driver, jumping in and pushing the pedal will result in a very short drive. And, since you’ve been invited to this event, flown across the Mediterranean to a plush resort (the name of the location — Porches — is not entirely a coincidence) on the Algarve, Portugal’s southern coast, the last thing you want to do is crash the car a minute and a half after you received the keys. Or later, for that matter.
Thus, at first you just take a seat and have a look at all the details. It’s the equivalent of making small talk with Haifa before you start the actual interview. These days, all cars have essentially the same layout — lights to the left, windshield wipers to the right of the steering wheel — but since you’re planning to drive fast, on windy mountain roads you really don’t want to have to take your eyes off the road to figure out how to turn on the air-condition.
More important than the A/C button will be the ones next to the gearshift, which let you select different suspension settings: Normal, Comfort, and Sport. You can call them the “Driving the girlfriend/wife to the restaurant,” “Driving to Work,” and “Driving on my day off” buttons. The big Sport button right next to them changes engine and transmission set-up and the gas pedal control to a more responsive, dynamic setting. And if you have air suspension, it lowers the chassis for better aerodynamics. It also increases the volume of the rear-end silencer, giving the car a bigger roar at higher speeds. Just to make sure that the driver does not mix up the “small” with the “big” Sport button, maybe one of them should be renamed.
Once you’ve looked at all the levers, switches and buttons, maybe even flipped through the manual (perfectly prepared ‘test drivers’ have already read it online before the trip), you have a last look at the steering wheel and see the “+” and “-” buttons. It’s the Tiptronic — shifting gears without having to take your hand off the wheel, just like a race-car driver. You eyes light up, thinking of the mountain roads mapped out in your roadbook. Now this will come in very handy …
Rule #3: After establishing a good relationship, you can (slowly) push the boundaries. The streets are excellent (it is Europe, after all) and the fact that it’s a Saturday means that traffic is light. You start to drive, slowly at first, and try out how it handles, how it reacts. ‘Well’ and ‘quickly’ come to mind. Then off to the highway. Too bad you’re not in Germany, as there wouldn’t be any speed limit. Oh well, a little over won’t hurt, but that’s what everyone else is doing and it doesn’t quite let you get the full Porsche feeling.
It turns out, then, that the mountain roads are much more fun. Granted, you can’t drive as fast as on the highway, but you can really enjoy the fact that the car you’re driving has almost three times as much power (405hp coming out of a 4.8l engine) than the ones you’re used to. And by now you have enough handle over this machine to start playing around with it. It’s all about acceleration. Which happens almost too fast for you to feel it. Instead of drifting over to the other lane, pushing the gas pedal to increase the speed, passing the car in front of you, looking in the mirror to see if you’re sufficiently ahead of it, then drifting back into the right lane, overtaking a car now goes like this: left, gas, right, done. If you’re in the passenger seat and blink, you will have missed it. But no worries — there’ll be plenty more opportunities to observe the maneuver.
However, this is where Rule #4 comes in: Never, ever forget Rule #1. If you think that after an hour on the road you’ve truly mastered a Cayenne GTS, you may be in for a rude awakening. (Thankfully, the brakes are excellent and the ABS totally reliable.) But then, it’s not like after an hour of chitchat with Haifa you’ll be part of her entourage or get invited to her birthday party. It takes some doing, and you have to be patient. I remember coming very close to flipping the first SUV I drove, when I learned almost too late that I couldn’t race it through the hairpin curves down Sunset Boulevard to Pacific Coast Highway the same way I did with my own sedan.
Conveniently, Porsche addressed exactly this issue. — an SUV’s innately high center of gravity that causes it to lean in curves — with a system called Porsche Dynamic Chassis Control (PDCC) that is optional in the GTS. When installed, the car stays glued to the road like a 911, even if you whip the steering wheel around at 90km/h. It’s a lot of fun, actually. Just make sure your passengers have their seatbelts on and whatever luggage you have is tied down.
Rule #5: As long as you’re polite, and once you’ve shown that you’ve done your homework and are a competent journalist, it’s perfectly alright to question a few things. Like, was Haifa’s Bint el-Wadi really such a good idea? Regarding the Cayenne, as a resident of Beirut I had to smile about Porsche’s announcement that soon the GPS SatNav will have maps for Lebanon, as I got visions of drivers quickly becoming irritated at the computer’s (understandable) unawareness of constant ad-hoc construction, closure of streets, aks al-seer traffic, and creative parking. Also, as a die-hard “stick” driver, the automatic transmission, even in Tiptronic mode, doesn’t feel quick enough. Yes, one soon gets the hang of downshifting before the curves through the “-” button on the steering wheel — real drivers use the brakes as little as possible — but I did miss the good ol’ clutch. It’s too bad that the regional market doesn’t like manuals and consequently the Cayenne will only be sold in the automatic version.
Most test drives, not unlike most interviews, end too quickly. This one certainly did. There’s still so much to try, a drive in the rain, or in the snow. Or, seeing as how in our region, the vast majority of the Cayenne will be sold in the Gulf, perhaps trying out a bit of wadi-bashing? Oh well, maybe the next test drive will be in Oman …
Matthias S. Klein is managing editor of EXECUTIVE. The GTS is available in Spring 2008.
