I WAS flying down a steep hillside when I glanced at the instruments and realized what I had achieved: a new personal best in a Porsche.
But this wasn’t the usual Porsche milestone, of some heroic track speed. Instead, I’d reached a more nerdy goal, recording a 30 miles per gallon highway average. What’s more, that notable mileage was reached by a charging-rhino S.U.V., the Cayenne, that usually ranks among the most greedily consumptive Porsches. Not so, however, with the new Cayenne S Hybrid.
In redesigning its Cayenne lineup for 2011, Porsche has tackled seemingly every shortcoming of an S.U.V. that mortified many of the company’s loyalists when it arrived in 2001.
As with many S.U.V.’s born in that era of hyper-masculine S.U.V.’s, the Porsche was burdened with macho off-road hardware that few owners used. With pavement-focused crossovers in their infancy, Porsche was also among companies that seemed unsure of what one was supposed to look like, and seemed unable to abandon truckish design tropes. The first Cayenne was also stingy on luxury, with a flat buckboard of a back seat that seemed at odds with prices that could top $100,000.
Yet between its class-busting performance, and the Porsche crest on the hood, the Cayenne became Porsche’s best-selling model around the world and a profit generator that helped to sustain the company.
This Cayenne’s styling changes are subtle, but they work. The car looks more like a tall, focused European sport wagon than a hodgepodge melding of a family hauler and a 911 sports car. At first glance, you’d swear the Porsche had been downsized, though it’s two inches longer and rides on a wheelbase 1.6 inches longer.
What’s not an illusion is the Porsche’s sudden weight loss and its salutary effects on performance and fuel economy. The Cayenne is about 400 pounds lighter than the last model, as big a drop as I’ve seen of late on an automobile.
Porsche saved 73 pounds by omitting the low-range gearbox (handy for off-road use but superfluous elsewhere), lightened the chassis and the body panels, and relied more on aluminum and plastic composites.
With its sumptuous Panamera sedan, Porsche seemed to recognize that the luxury of its interiors hadn’t been keeping pace with its prices. The Cayenne’s pleasing new cockpit adopts the Panamera’s strikingly banked aircraft-style center console and its touch-screen infotainment system. A second high-resolution screen in the driver’s cluster also shows Porsche moving into the digital age, displaying navigation, audio information and more.
The front seats are faultless for either aggressive driving or family trips. And the rear seats have much better shape and definition, allowing drivers to whip around turns without treating rear occupants like human hockey pucks. Those seats now slide about six inches forward and back, and can recline up to 6 degrees.
The makers of first-generation touch screens rarely get everything right — especially if German engineers are involved — and the Porsche is no exception. In functional terms, the system will get you home, but negotiating the onscreen menus results in too many operational wrong turns and dead ends. And though the console itself looks like something out of the Starship Enterprise, you might want Sulu riding shotgun to deal with all of its tiny buttons.
The Cayenne’s newfound advantages are largely and smartly confined to the street. I tested two of the four Cayenne models: the S, which starts at $64,675 with a 400-horsepower 4.8-liter V-8, and the Hybrid, which starts at $68,675 and produces 380 horsepower by joining an Audi-based supercharged V-6, electric motor and nickel-metal-hydride batteries.
That hybrid system, and the Cayenne’s platform, is shared with the new Volkswagen Touareg Hybrid. If Porsche buyers don’t lose sleep over having an Audi engine, they’ll enjoy the rare hybrid that smoothly juggles performance and economy.
Most high-performance hybrids, including BMW’s competing ActiveHybrid X6, have seemed like green window dressing. Adding a hybrid system sends the price shooting up while mileage and performance barely budge.