2024 Porsche Macan Turbo review

I think it looks brilliant. I know, I know we shouldn’t be judging such matters, but the EV era poses a particular problem for hapless hacks like me: you know already I am no more going to be waxing lyrical about the timbre of this car’s motors than I’ll be rhapsodising about the quality of the gearshift it doesn’t have. In the absence of so much of the meat of what we used to write about, those aspects as crucial to creating the character of the car as they are to getting you to work on time, we have to look elsewhere for interest.

As do those charged with designing these cars, so it is perhaps no great surprise that they’ve used the stylistic freedoms inherent within EV design and just tried far harder to create an interesting shape than was ever possible with someone else’s ancient platform foisted upon you by Wolfsburg big cheeses. The result is a shape that can seem a touch busy from some angles, but which is packed with presence and really draws the eye and for almost exclusively the right reasons.

The cabin is even better. There’s not vast room in the back, presumably to ensure there remains a reason for people to buy the EV Cayenne that will come on the same platform, but the boot is big and the driving position up front can be set surprisingly low and racy for an SUV. Quality seems to have reached a new level for Porsche and I really like that its interior designers have integrated the entire infotainment system into the dash rather than just mount a gravestone-sized tablet on the fascia. All its most popular functions work as well as any, though those looking for less common operations will not escape death by submenu here any more than in any other new and complex EV. These days I tend merely to thank heaven for CarPlay and move on.

It’s quick, of course it is. Not quite as alarmingly and, yes, unpleasantly quick as the fastest Taycans are at max attack these days, but quick enough to make overtaking a here-one-instant-gone-the-next affair. And it’s faster even than the numbers suggest because in an ICE car a period of time elapses between your foot issuing an instruction and an engine gathering sufficient speed to execute it, while the Macan is already in the next postcode.

But so too is there something missing. Porsche has taken an avowedly purist approach to EV engineering so far, and has resisted the urge to do things like fit paddles which can be used to alter throttle pedal brake regeneration because its view is you have two pedals – one to make the car go faster, the other to make it slow down – and as both are controlled by electronics, out there in the real world the same amount of energy is recovered either way. It’s just done by a different pedal.

Nor has it resorted to the now famous illusion performed by the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N which can be persuaded to sound like a BDA-powered Mk2 Escort, has flawlessly recreated paddleshift ‘gears’ complete with virtual ratios and will even let you headbutt a staccato rev-limiter if you don’t shift up fast enough. I was massively sniffy about all of this until I used it and now I think ‘why not?’. It’s just a button, you can turn it off and it just makes life more fun in a kind of car that’s crying out for a little aural inspiration. Quite a lot more fun, in fact.

Maybe Porsche’s view is that while a company like Hyundai without a stellar sports and sporting car heritage can afford to and profit from playing such games, for Porsche to indulge in such artifice would be the thinnest edge of the wedge. And I get that. But I also get that everything about driving is synthesised in these days when throttle and brake pedals are mere electrical connections, where steering feel is manufactured and even the sound made by this Macan’s whirring electric motors has been acoustically enhanced, to put it mildly. It’s all an illusion, so why not play along or at least give your customers the choice? Who wouldn’t want to dial up their son du jour from a menu of Porsche’s greatest sounding road and race cars? A 1974 3-litre RSR on slide throttles? Works for me.

But goodness me it handles well, at least with the optional four-wheel steering fitted to the test car I drove (a torque vectoring rear diff is standard on the Turbo, too). Of course it’s implicit that I mean for a 2.4-tonne car and I cannot pass without commenting on this car’s gargantuan 400kg weight gain from generation to generation, but this Macan still presents a blindingly rapid way of getting from one place to the next. And when you think of all Porsche has had to deal with here – putting that torque on the road, controlling that mass, generating that grip and still serving up a more than acceptable level of ride comfort – you might find yourself silently mouthing ‘bravo’ at the end of a decent stretch.

The car is so fluent. Part of its secret is simply that its design allows it to park its centre of gravity fully 140mm closer to the deck than the old Macan, but so too has Porsche married the art of tuning the mechanical bits of the suspension systems with the science of doing the same with its electronic components with uncanny finesse. Truly, for a car of this size and mass the way it gets down a road is a thing to behold.

Is it, then, too much to hope that it might provide more actual fun too? It’s hard to pin it down to one characteristic, but the sense is that of a car doing what it does simply because it can, not because it particularly wants to. All those clichés about man and machine in perfect harmony are nowhere to be seen. It’s more of a servant/master relationship with you cast as Bertram Wooster in at least nominal command of an entirely unflappable Jeeves who has a far better idea of what’s going on and what to do about it than you.

When the other Andrew reviewed the Macan back in the spring he preferred the standard car by a distance and knowing both him and the fact it would be a simpler, lighter car I can’t say I’m surprised – and he is as rock solid a judge of cars as exists in this industry. I understand why the Turbo is the way it is: it’s the flagship, the big banger, the one with all the numbers, the one toward which people who enjoy startling their passengers will be instinctively drawn.

And for a 2.4-tonne electric SUV I thought it pretty damn good too. But I have a hunch that Signor Inglese might be onto something. Nor for the first time in a Porsche model line up, it seems less could be more all over again. I look forward to finding out for myself.

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