2024 Porsche Macan 4 review

Time alone will tell whether this was the correct strategy or merely the correct strategy for now. Platforms are damned expensive things to design and while the cars that sit atop them change quite often, the structures upon which they’re placed are required to hang around for quite a lot longer.

So maybe those who’ve gone all in with EV platforms will be vindicated in the long run. Maybe they don’t mind losing the early skirmishes if it means they end up winning the war. Porsche will be hoping so. In the Taycan it has the best EV yet made, but today people are more likely to discuss their residual values than their time-warp speed. And now the electric Macan is here, sat defiantly atop an EV-only platform.

It is more essential for Porsche to get this call right than almost any other manufacturer, because for years the Macan has been its golden goose, combining high volumes and high margins to help it vie with Ferrari for the title of world’s most profitable car company relative to turnover in the world.

And this Macan 4 is going to be doing a lot of that heavy lifting.

When I drove the top of the range Macan Turbo I concluded it was asking a lot of additional money for a level of extra performance of little real world value, and that this more affordable version might prove the better choice. And so it does. It has the same battery as the Turbo and clearly a superior genuine range (even if not reflected in the official data). It has the same top quality interior and while it sits on coil springs as standard rather than air, the ride quality feels no worse for it to me.

All it can’t do is keep up with a McLaren F1 from rest to 62mph, but I just don’t think that’s important. The numbers say 5.2sec because it has ‘only’ 408bhp rather than 630bhp, but you have to remember it feels much faster than a petrol car recording the same figure because of the time taken by an ICE powertrain even to get the car moving relative to an EV.

The Macan 4 is a little lighter too and, on its metal springs, feels a little more alive in your hands on a decent road where, despite its immense weight and thanks largely to a belly-crawling centre of gravity and Porsche’s typically fluent set up work, it is faster, more composed and more involving than outward appearances would ever suggest.

But it still may prove a hard sell when a not dissimilar amount of money will buy a now range-topping ICE Macan GTS (in the UK at least if not in Europe where it’s no longer for sale) with a little more power and a lot (as in 370kg) less weight. Impressive though the Macan 4 is, such facts remain hard to ignore.

Indeed, it seems Porsche is finding it as difficult as anyone. As we go to press I read that Porsche is re-evaluating its EV rollout strategy and examining ways in which an ICE or plug-in combustion engine might find its way into the new Macan after all…

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