First Drive Review
How far can one wander from Porsche’s vaunted 930 yet still wear the capital-t “Turbo” badge? The 2015 Cayenne Turbo is likely the answer. Cut from the same midcycle-refresh cloth as the six-pot Cayenne S, the Turbo adds a pair of cylinders to that model’s equation. Before this year, the Turbo was the only path to a pair of escargot, but the S has now downsized from a naturally aspirated V-8 to a slightly uprated version of the Macan Turbo’s twin-turbocharged V-6 engine. (Confusingly, the Macan S also features a twin-turbo V-6.)
So at this point, Porsche may as well badge its Turbo-branded utes as “Very Turbo.” Echt Turbo? You see, the Cayenne Turbo’s double-puffed V-8 offers up 520 horsepower. If you’re keeping track, that’s just about double the output of this original 911 Turbo. An ’86 930 tipped our scales at 3040 pounds. The modern SUV adds literally a ton of additional mass, weighing in at an estimated 5200 pounds.
Of course, the 930 was often derided/admired as a widow-maker, with tricky understeer-into-oversteer characteristics exacerbated by early engine-management technology (read: turbo lag). The Cayenne suffers from no such issues. The only eventful thing about wheeling the top-spec Porsche ute is the quickness with which the needle sweeps the speedo’s face.
The Cayenne Turbo’s driver-focused cockpit—which is immediately familiar to anybody who’s driven a recent 911, Panamera, or Boxster—may well deliver the most unique experience in the Porsche line. Unique because it’s a little more like vehicles not built by Porsche. You can’t wholly mask bulk, and the 2.5-ton Turbo certainly has its share. You can, however, make bulk do pretty astonishing things these days. Better living through chemistry and all that.
Although it’s not as visceral an accelerative experience as the ripping (and less expensive) Range Rover Sport Supercharged—even as the Porsche is likely a tick quicker—the Turbo displays a composed serenity in situations where a BMW X5 M would feel brittle and stiff. It’ll waft up to speed like a Mercedes-Benz ML63 AMG, stick its nose into a hairpin, and track through in a way that nothing this top-heavy really has a right to.
While the Panamera Turbo gets Porsche’s excellent PDK dual-clutch transmission, the Cayenne that shares its motor makes due with an eight-speed slushbox with a tendency to hammer home shifts punctuated by a chassis-juddering thwunk. It’s completely out of character with the rest of the strop-honed refinement displayed by the vehicle, and especially jarring when it happens midcorner. The unsettledness is a nano-momentary thing, and the underpinnings are certainly capable of keeping the machine on course, but the behavior is slightly unnerving at speed. The trans, though, is the sole flaw in an otherwise wholly bulletproof suit of mountain-warfare armor.
Other entries in the super-SUV class demand your faith via mathematics. The Cayenne Turbo earns it by putting you immediately at ease on surfaces solid, slippery, and/or frangible. That top-of-the-pile confidence comes with a price, though—in this case at least $114,595.
