The V8-engined Turbo S E-Hybrid Sport Turismo sits at the very top of the Panamera tree. Does the performance advantage make a compelling enough case for it over its V6-powered little brother?
Everything about the Porsche Panamera Turbo S e-Hybrid Sport Turismo is big. That name, for a start. The Panamera, as you’ll probably know, is Porsche’s big sporty executive car, now in its second generation. Turbo S signifies that it has the most potent engine available, the VW Group’s ubiquitous 4.0-litre, twin-turbocharged V8. You’ll find this in nearly every big performance car under the VW umbrella, from the Bentley Continental GT to the Lamborghini Urus. Here, it makes 563bhp.
Then there’s the e-Hybrid part, further signified by a series of acid-green flashes inside and out. This is self-explanatory – that engine is augmented by a 17.8kWh battery, driving a 134bhp electric motor. It’s a plug-in hybrid, and will cruise about silently in all-electric mode for a claimed 30 miles and up to 87mph. Finally, Sport Turismo – this is Porsche-speak for estate car. Don’t mistake this for something that will swallow a chest of drawers, though. It’s very much the sort of swoopy, sporty estate that other manufacturers might call a Shooting Brake. Thankfully, Porsche don’t – that’s a name that should really be reserved for three-door cars.
It’s not just the name that’s big, though. All the numbers are, too. With stonking twin-turbo V8 and electric motors working in harmony, the Panamera – as we’ll henceforth refer to it for the sake of brevity – kicks out a combined 690bhp. This ties it with the most powerful production 911 ever, the slightly mad 991 GT2 RS. In fact, to our reckoning, only two roadgoing Porsches have bested this figure. One is the all-electric Taycan Turbo S, which will make 751bhp in 2.5-second bursts under launch control. The other is the 918 Spyder. It needs that amount of power to compensate for some other big numbers, though. It’s over five metres long, and over two wide with the mirrors out. DIN weight is a chunky 2,365kg.
There’s a hierarchy of hybrids within the Panamera range, which this car sits at the top of. At the other end is the 456bhp, V6-powered Panamera 4 e-Hybrid. That car, in Sport Turismo guise, starts at £88,900. The range topping E-Hybrid Sport Turismo begins at £149,100. As tested, this one comes in at £165,408. The big question, then, is whether that significant extra outlay is worth it over a car that we boldly claimed might be one of the most well-rounded, broadly capable cars on the market.
From the get-go, the difference isn’t profound. The car defaults to full electric running on start-up if there’s enough juice in the battery, and wafts about in remarkable hush, the biggest source of noise the Michelin Pilot Sport tyres thumping against the road.
One turn of the lovely, tactile little clickwheel on the steering wheel puts the car in Hybrid Auto mode. There’s a distant rumble as the V8 fires up, the electric motor filling in the gaps where necessary. In this setting, it’s a beautiful cruiser, the active air suspension masking the sheer heft and allowing the car to ride uncannily smoothly over lumpy roads.
There’s very little in these first two modes that give away the sheer potency of this car. In Hybrid Auto, it’s swift, but doesn’t deliver the kick to the gut that 690bhp and a quoted 0-60 time of 3.2 seconds suggests. Outwardly too, it’s pleasingly subtle, especially when finished in the wonderful Instagram staple colour that is Oak Green, paired with tasteful silver wheels.
Sure, there’s an electronic spoiler that pops up at higher speeds, and bright yellow brake calipers signifying this car’s ceramic composite brakes. To most onlookers, though, it’s simply a big, dark green estate car, albeit one with a sporty badge on it. Especially in this spec, it looks right at home in some of London’s most elegant, old-money regions, even though its girth warranted a passenger hopping out to guide us through a width restrictor in leafy Hampstead.
The thing is, there’s two more settings for you to dial that little drive mode selector round to. Twist it round to Sport, and you hear valves open in the exhaust (and, truthfully, more noise being piped through the speakers – do we still care about this in 2023?). Left in automatic mode, the 8-speed PDK gearbox will likely drop a gear or two, and there’ll be a sense that the whole car has tensed up, tightened a little. In Sport Plus, those effects are multiplied again, and the Panamera feels as though it’s straining at an imaginary leash. Rev it at a standstill, and the whole car rocks from side to side like a hopped-up ’60s muscle car preparing to rip down the quarter mile.
The four-wheel drive and suite of electronic systems make deploying this car’s deeply impressive performance laughably easy. Overtaking becomes effortless, and when accelerating out of a village to the national speed limit, the car simply refuses to acknowledge the existence of any numbers between 30 and 60. Nothing you can legally, responsibly do on British roads even ruffles the Turbo S’s feathers. Porsche’s PDK gearbox is predictably brilliant, as are the slender, deliciously tactile metal paddles behind the wheel.
Despite the size, the unassuming looks, the practical-ish five-door body, this is still a Porsche, so should still be able to thrill on a twisty road. Its success here is mixed. Pour it through a series of bends and it grips relentlessly, the active systems doing their best to defy physics and keep that mass in check as it attempts to shift from left to right. The ceramic composite brakes, which can feel a little numb and tricky to modulate around town, are suddenly viciously effective in scrubbing off speed.
But the way it goes about its business at speed can feel slightly cold and clinical. It’s like watching Max Verstappen dominate this season of F1 – so effective, so brutally efficient, that it sometimes appears to come at the expense of actually having any fun. It’s simply one incredible performance to the next – exciting a couple of times, but the novelty can quickly wear off.
This car’s intended stomping ground is obviously whizzing city to city on big, open motorways – possibly of the German variety. if that mythical stretch of wide open, traffic-free, miles-long stretch of Autobahn that road testers like to fantasise about actually exists somewhere in deepest Deutschland, the Panamera will run up to a claimed 196mph. Don’t forget that Porsche like to underreport their performance figures, though – it wouldn’t surprise us to see a ‘2’ appear at the start of that digital speed readout that sits in the centre of a trad Porsche five-dial cluster.
For this job, it’s a wonderful car. Dial it back to Hybrid Auto, let the PDK sit in eighth, and the Panamera lopes along, the V8 barely troubled by revs as it shuts down half its cylinders to save fuel. Being a PHEV, the claimed, lab-optimised MPG figure of 97.4 is laughably optimistic, but after a weekend of cruising up and down motorways, exploring sinuous B-roads and inching around London while leaning heavily on the electric motors, it proved a remarkably frugal car.
The thing is, though, its V6-powered little sibling does all of that just as well. And with more exploitable power, and less weight to shift around, when you find yourself presented with a good stretch of road, the cheaper, slower car can prove the more satisfying companion.
As we said when we drove it, the lesser Panamera 4 e-Hybrid is by no means a slow car – by Porsche’s own reckoning, it will outdrag a current 911 Carrera T to 62, and makes more power than a 959. For road driving, these numbers are more than adequate. For track driving? Come on, nobody’s tracking their two-tonne hybrid estate cars.
There will always be those who have the funds and the desire to go for the model with the longest name and the biggest price tag. When they’ve parted with upwards of £150k for a Panamera Turbo S e-Hybrid Sport Turismo, they won’t be disappointed: it’s a superbly complete, well-rounded car. It’s also arguably a more emotionally-driven choice – in Sport and Sport Plus modes, that thumping V8 is a wonderfully charismatic engine, regardless of how artificial some of its posturing is, and certainly a sweeter-sounding thing than the V6 in its little brother.
But, after a weekend with the fastest, most expensive Panamera of them all, it was hard to think of a scenario where the huge extra outlay and vast reserves of power would be worth it. Of course, if raw performance is what you’re after, but a longroof Porsche is an absolute must, there is, shockingly, another way. It has no engine at all.
