The rest of the Cayenne is pretty much the same as before. Step up into the car and the ambience is not that of a £75,000 vehicle. There’s too much plastic on the dash, far too many small and fiddly buttons and crummy sat-nav graphics with which to contend – once, of course, you’ve got your head around the needlessly fussy and complex operating system.
More fundamentally and very surprisingly, the Cayenne is dreadfully packaged. Legroom is limited in the back, and if you’re much more than six feet tall you’ll find it restricted in the front, too.
No attempt has been made to make the interior versatile. Indeed, the rear seats only fold (rather than sliding as well) and then only once you’ve near-enough bust a gut taking the headrests off. At least the boot is large, well shaped and, thanks to the air suspension’s variable ride height, not too difficult to load.
So living with the Cayenne Turbo is very much a mixed blessing, even if yours is a country postcode where you will be neither insulted by local greenies nor injured by aggressive anti-SUV legislation.
If your family is small and unlikely to grow, it makes a formidable all-purpose, all-weather weapon. It’s very refined on a long run – though the tyres can be noisy on coarse surfaces – while even the fuel economy has improved. No one’s going to be canonised for driving a car that returns 19.1mpg at best, and more realistically a 12.3mpg average, but at least the 100-litre tank gives a reasonable range of 300 to 400 miles between credit card fires.
While Porsche no longer makes any reference to its SUV’s off-road ability, it retains the added benefit of low-range transmission, not to mention a 3500kg towing ability – as much as any Range Rover will manage. But if you harbour greater ambition for your Cayenne and hope it will fulfil the role of family bus as well as thinly veiled supercar, its lack of interior space and flexibility is likely to leave you feeling severely short-changed.