2011 Porsche Cayenne Hybrid Review

2011 Porsche Cayenne Hybrid Review It's Porsche's best selling car, truck. So they don't want to screw it up. Here is the resigned 3rd generation Cayenne. Now, first of all check out the lines. It's got sort of a Panamera flavored nose and honestly kind of an Infiniti flavored rump. They've rounded and sculpted everything down. A lot of the chunky shoulders and corners have been knocked down and honestly it prints far or less bulky in person than the outgoing model. That's either a good or a bad thing depending on whether you felt the outgoing Cayenne was ugly or you loved the truckishness of it. Either way, this is what you got going forward. Now beyond all that, this Cayenne isn't just any new restyled Cayenne. It's the new Cayenne S Hybrid. A 3-liter V6 hooked up to an electric motor with 47 horsepower all in 380 horsepower and 427 foot pounds of yummy torque which is great for a biggish vehicle like this. They're predicting 40 miles of EV running straight out and up to 97 miles an hour in EV mode. If so that's our new record for a production car by a country mile. By the way it all goes out through a new 8-speed version of Porsche's Tiptronic not the PDK dual clutch. It's not the ideal gearbox for this, you know, relatively tame package. And helping out this hybrid version as well as every new Cayenne is the fact that Porsche has shaved about 400 pounds off the basic platform. Now, this was like a 5600-pound car as I recall so it'll still be north of 5,000 is my hunch but that's a big savings. Oh, let me show you some stuff inside. Now, if you saw my recent video about the current generation of the GTS Cayenne, you know that I bitched all day long about the cabin layout. That has largely been addressed in this version. First of all the NAV screen on the second gen car was kind of down here by your knees and facing straight back, horrible ergonomics. Now they've lifted it up to pretty much the top of the stack in relative eyeline with the gauges and tilted toward your eyes. Thank you. We have a very different layout of some of the switch gear in this low sloping console. This is a completely new think although I'm seeing a lot of suspension and drive mode controls that are very familiar here. Here's that controller for that 8-speed Tiptronic. And while we still have this sort of classic Porsche cluster of gauges, they've made a big improvement on the helper gauge, the one just to the right of the tach. That's now a full-color LCD where on current 2nd gen car it's this bad metal looking orange on black, just way out of date. So that's a nice improvement in terms of cabin tech as well. I'm also spying some other interesting, maybe goofy, touches like an actual mechanical compass. Is that there? Quaint touch. Some generous sized screen rear seat entertainment modules here behind the seats and in general a high level of trim which tells us enough because this vehicle is not yet priced, but it's going to be a lot of bucks. I'm guessing well north of a hundred. Now, no MPG numbers yet. We'll have to see what the EPA does with this guy. But availability is set as follows: The S and the Turbo come out first in July and then in the fall the base Cayenne and this guy, the new S Hybrid, follow a few months later.