Porsche Cayenne Electric review

Good stuff again from Porsche in terms of the Cayenne’s interior. As mentioned, human space is more than adequate across the board, the boot cavernous, quality as you might expect. Our black leather interior wasn’t the most inspiring colourway, but it worked, and the photochromic optional panoramic/opening sunroof helps with the brightness.

It also does patterns as well as the basic opaque/clear – though that seems to be a flex rather than a real convenience. As are the ‘mood modes’ which alter the ambient lighting colours, air-con and ambient vibes. It’s fun for a bit, but you do tend to set these things once and then not play with them much thereafter.

The main story is the new dash, and it is good. The curved driver’s display can be configured to show whatever you may require, supplemented by the wide head-up display projected on the windscreen. So you can have sat-nav everywhere you look, recuperation and power graphs and bars, battery info, temperatures, speed … it’s all there. And yes, the traditional five Porsche dials look best.

The centre of the car is dominated by a large OLED screen that curves at the bottom, with a generous wrist-rest just aft of the angled aspect. That’s the ‘Ferry-Pad’ that aids stability when poking at the digital tiles that always land on the bottom two inches of screen. Again, these are configurable, so you can have most-used functions to hand all the time. 

The passenger side gets its own optional screen, again, displaying whatever suits – or for watching Netflix/playing computer games if your passenger bores of your conversation. It’s all slick, nicely arranged and crisp. Yes, it is a little overwhelming at first, but time and miles allow you to re-arrange things so that you know where they are and what to do with them. It’s much more intuitive than, say, Mercedes’ Hyperscreen, which just feels like screen for screen’s sake.

A fun game to play is to try and find a function/screen/tile which you haven’t seen before. In a full-spec Cayenne Turbo, that could take months of traffic light investigations.

Remind me, what’s the boot like?

An aircraft hangar on wheels. Which explains the 747 (geddit?!) litres of space back there with the seats up. Fell the rear bench and that more than doubles to 1,554 – the sort of litreage you need when you’ve refused to pay extra for the delivery of a new washing machine.

Remind me, what’s the boot like?

An aircraft hangar on wheels. Which explains the 747 (geddit?!) litres of space back there with the seats up. Fell the rear bench and that more than doubles to 1,554 – the sort of litreage you need when you’ve refused to pay extra for the delivery of a new washing machine.

The frunk (‘front trunk’, if you’ve been living under a rock for the last 10 years) is a handy 90 litres. You can supplant cables and other gubbins in there, or a soft bag if you’re on a trip and have exhausted the boot space.