Porsche Cayenne Coupe review

Worried the sloping roofline will sever headroom in the back? Porsche has lowered the back seats by 30mm, even though the roof has only dropped 20mm. Worried the aerodynamic profile’s gone skew-whiff? Porsche has added another rear spoiler, so as well as the roof there’s now an active device on the tailgate. Told you the engineering was exhaustive.

But while the Panamera's Sport Turismo variant brought space alongside its svelter looks, the opposite has happened here. Headroom does present itself as an issue for anyone measuring six feet or more, who’ll find their hair brushing the ceiling in a way it doesn’t in the back of a standard Cayenne.

And for anyone else?

It should be cavernous. The total boot capacity is down almost 200 litres, though at 1,344 litres with the seats down, even the hybrids remain pretty roomy. Just with a fairly high floor for loading stuff onto.

If you want five seats, you can’t have the carbon roof, which only comes as part of an incongruously named ‘Lightweight Sport Package’ that shaves negligible kilos from a two-tonne-plus SUV.

In fact, trim and colour options are dizzying, with Race-Tex, leather and carbon seemingly ready to be draped alternately across every surface bar the windows. You even get a 911 R-esque houndstooth cloth pattern in the middle of the seats if you’ve specced the lightweight pack. Y’know, just to really stick two fingers up to the purists. It does look damn good, mind, especially with the suede-effect GT steering wheel before it.

Is it technophobe friendly?

Well, the third-gen Cayenne’s big mid-life update has taken an already techy interior further into the world of touchscreens. The headlines being the loss of an analogue rev counter as digital dials gobble up all the instrumentation, and the somewhat OTT option of an additional display screen for the passenger.

It allows them to fiddle with apps and stream TV without distracting the driver, but the protective film capable of such witchcraft also makes the display oddly unsharp and a little nauseous to glare at for too long (at least for us). Maybe a few more hours staring at their phone will suffice. On which note, those can be charged quickly inside a specially cooled compartment.