Silent thunder
Words by Hannah Tapping
Taking the all-new Porsche Cayenne Electric through its paces.
Porsche has taken the car that built its SUV empire and unplugged it from petrol entirely. The result, the new Cayenne Electric and its swaggering Turbo sibling have taken the electric market by storm. As something of a petrol head and driving purist, I have to admit that the lack of pistons and any form of combustion was making me furrow my brow… So, I drove from the Lizard to Land’s End to find out whether a battery can still make a Cornish B-road feel exciting.
Beginning my journey early, before the gulls have got their voices going and the car parks fill with people in the wrong shoes, the silence is made of wind and gorse and a distant thrum from the Atlantic waves. I mention this because I drive away with 1,156 horsepower and none of it is disturbed. The Cayenne Turbo Electric is, on paper, the most powerful production Porsche the company has ever built. By that, I mean not the most powerful electric Porsche, not even the most powerful SUV… but the most powerful Porsche, full stop, in 100 years of building the things. Zero to 100 km/h in 2.5 seconds. A top speed of 260 km/h, not that you will find anywhere on the A3083 to try it. When you do plant your foot, the numbers stop mattering and something more primal takes over, because 1,500 Nm of torque arriving with no fuss whatsoever is not an experience you can graph, rather one you feel down the back of your neck.
I will admit, I approached this test with the same scepticism I bring to most things that claim to have reinvented an icon. The Cayenne is not just any Porsche. It is the car that, back in 2002, took a company famous for small, glorious sports cars and taught it how to sell SUVs to the sort of people who summer in Rock and winter in the Alps. It saved Porsche financially and possibly from itself. Messing with that formula seemed, from a distance, like the sort of decision made by someone who has never had to explain themselves to a room full of purists. However, up close, on the road, my scepticism didn’t survive the first roundabout.
Both the entry Cayenne Electric and the range-topping Turbo ride on adaptive air suspension as standard, and the Turbo I had, came fitted with Porsche Active Ride, a system borrowed from the brand’s sports saloons that does something close to witchcraft to body control. Cornish roads do not do you many favours as they heave and camber and throw in the odd unmarked dip specifically designed, I am convinced, to catch out anyone driving anything with a soft, wallowing chassis. The Cayenne simply refused to wallow. Through the tighter sections near Mullion, where the hedgerows close in and you are essentially threading a needle at speed, the car stayed flat and planted in a way that a two and a half tonne SUV has no business managing. Some of that is the air suspension, while on the Turbo, some comes from rear-axle steering nudging the back-end round corners like it is reading your mind slightly before you have finished thinking the thought.
The brakes deserve a mention too, mostly because you barely use them. Porsche has built in recuperation figures that borrow directly from its Formula E programme, up to 600 kW of it, and the company reckons around 97% of everyday braking is handled by the electric motors alone. Lifting off the accelerator approaching the hairpin above Church Cove and the car simply slows, no drama, no pedal required if you do not want one. It takes an afternoon of driving to trust it. By the second afternoon, I had stopped touching the middle pedal almost entirely, which felt like cheating until I remembered that was rather the point.
Range and charging are, of course, the questions everyone actually wants answered, because a Porsche that can’t get you from The Lizard to a meeting in Exeter without an anxious diversion via a service station is not much of a Porsche. The figures here are genuinely startling. Up to 642 km of WLTP range from the SUV, and the newly revealed Coupé version pushes that to 669 km thanks to a slipperier body and a drag coefficient of just 0.23. Find a suitable 400 kW charger, admittedly not something littering every Cornish lay-by just yet, and you can take the battery from 10% to 80% in under 16 minutes. Ten minutes on the right charger buys you over 300 kilometres of range. I plugged in at a service station expecting to make a phone call and a coffee last the whole session… barely finished the coffee.
Inside, Porsche has clearly decided that if the drivetrain is going to be silent, the cabin had better work harder to earn its keep. The centrepiece is the Flow Display, a curved OLED unit that slides into the centre console like something from a much more expensive spaceship, joined by a 14.25-inch instrument cluster and, in my test car, an optional passenger screen streaming something I studiously ignored while driving. There is a head-up display too, using augmented reality to project what amounts to an 87-inch image ten metres down the road ahead, layering navigation directly onto the tarmac in front of you. It sounds like a gimmick, but on the switchback down towards Porthcurno, with the light dropping and the road doing something unkind and unmarked, it stopped being a gimmick and became genuinely useful.
What impressed me more than the screens, oddly, were the buttons Porsche has refused to get rid of. Volume, air conditioning, the lights, all still analogue dials and switches within reach of the wrist rest, because somebody in Weissach understood that fumbling through a touchscreen menu at 60 mph to turn the heating down is a hazard as opposed to a luxury. The voice assistant, meanwhile, has had a proper brain transplant, running on large language models that let you ask something genuinely conversational, along the lines of where to get a decent pasty near St Just, and get back something resembling an actual answer rather than a baffled silence.
None of which answers the only question that matters for a car wearing this badge: does it still feel like a Porsche, or does it merely look like one wearing a battery for a heart? Having spent two days throwing it at Cornwall’s least forgiving roads, I can report that the steering still talks to you, the chassis still wants to be driven properly rather than merely piloted and the whole thing carries that unmistakable sense of a car built by people who care more about the drive than the spec sheet. Even though the spec sheet, in this case, happens to be extraordinary.
The Cayenne built Porsche’s second act two decades ago. On this evidence, electrification has not diluted it. If anything, freed from the engine note that used to do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting, the chassis and the software have had to prove themselves properly, and out here, on roads that punish anything built to a spreadsheet rather than a purpose, they have. In the words of Noel: “She’s electric, can I be electric too?”
The all-electric Cayenne family now includes SUV and Coupé body styles across Cayenne, S and Turbo variants.
