Porsche Panamera (2010)

We're in a 2004 Ford E-350 shuttle van on the way to the airport and we're about to yank the steering wheel out of the driver's hands and give him some pretty firm advice about his coordination of the throttle and brake pedals.

We hate being a passenger.

Nevertheless, we're on our way to the famous Porsche test track at Weissach, out in the German countryside west of Stuttgart, where we're going to see the 2010 Porsche Panamera. We've already been warned that there will be no test-driving of the four-door Panamera sedan — not by any non-Porsche personnel, anyway.

Rats. We hate being a passenger.

Ride, Captain, Ride
After 10 hours in a Boeing 747-400 and then another hour in a Setra S415 bus, we're woozy and sleepless. Sure, these are luxury rides, but did we mention that we hate being a passenger?

Finally we're at Weissach, the famous development center that's the home of all things Porsche. A dozen Porsche 911 GT3 Cup cars in plain white have been lined up precisely like so many Kias on a sales lot, waiting for their respective race teams to pick them up, cover them with sponsor logos and then flog the tar out of them.

And then there is the 2010 Porsche Panamera. Or rather there are three of them: a rear-wheel-drive S, an all-wheel-drive 4S and the all-wheel-drive Turbo. Lower and wider than expected, they all look much better in the metal than in any photograph.

Still, this front-engine car is not pretty in the Italian-supercar sense of the word. Up front, the Panamera is pure Porsche, but farther back there are four doors and a generous hatchback, lending the car a bloated look. You've seen it before in the Porsche 928 — and the AMC Pacer.

They Meant To Do That
Like the Pacer, the Panamera's styling results from an inside-out design approach, though our German hosts utterly failed to make the same analogy. What they said instead was that the Panamera needed to be a true Grand Touring car with seats for four full-size adults and their luggage. And so it is. Our 6-foot-2 frame fits easily in the backseat, with plenty of legroom, headroom and space for a cross-country trip. And by country, we mean the U.S.A., not Monaco.

The rear seats are eight-way power-adjustable units that not only recline but also feature adjustable thigh support and powered lumbar support. There are seat heaters and flow-through cooling fans in the bottom cushions and backrests. This is quite a departure in backseat design from the company that brought you the jump seats in the back of the 911.

The precisely mitered space beneath the 2010 Porsche Panamera's rear hatch is generous as well, offering 15.7 cubic feet of capacity. Flop the rear seatbacks forward and you get a flat load floor and 44.6 cubic feet. We tell the Porsche engineers that you could use the Panamera to make a run to Costco or Home Depot. They seem confused by our comment.

Performance Matters, but So Does Comfort
Porsche wants the 2010 Panamera to be comfortable in motion as well as at rest, and our hosts speak of ride quality, quiet and the need to be able to hear the stereo properly. But it is also meant to be a Porsche.
So instead of starting with a mainstream sedan and making an AMG or M-sport version with add-on styling bits and retuned suspension bits, Porsche designed in the performance at the start. So the balance between comfort and performance is preengineered, not reengineered.

It all starts with a low, wide body with the traditional Porsche shape, which pays immediate dividends in terms of light weight and a low center of gravity. The car measures 195.6 inches overall, and it's 76 inches wide and 55.8 inches high. It rides on a 115-inch wheelbase.

While the central core of the Panamera's body structure is steel for rigidity, crashworthiness and good acoustics, the front frame horns are aluminum. The hood, doors and rear hatch are also aluminum, as are the front double-wishbone suspension and the rear multilink suspension and their subframes.

As a result, the rear-wheel-drive Panamera S weighs 3,968 pounds by Porsche's measure. While that's not exactly as light as a Lotus, the Panamera is substantially lighter than the 4,387-pound Maserati Quattroporte or the 4,663-pound Mercedes-Benz S63 AMG. Just as important, minimizing the weight at the extreme ends of a car reduces its polar moment of inertia, and this produces quicker handling reflexes. And keeping the suspension's unsprung mass to the absolute minimum with aluminum simultaneously improves road-holding and ride comfort.

Tech Tricks
The Panamera Turbo has an air suspension system that features a neat trick. In normal mode, the full volume of the air chamber in each suspension unit is available, a configuration that delivers a smooth ride. Flick the cockpit switch to Sport Plus and an internal valve reduces the volume by half, increasing the spring rate for high-speed driving and lowering the ride height in the bargain. This suspension system is also optional for the Panamera S and Panamera 4S.

Then there's Porsche's PDCC (Porsche dynamic chassis control), a system of active stabilizer bars that we praised when it was introduced by the Porsche Cayenne. Here it de-couples the stabilizer bars while you're driving straight down the road, improving ride comfort over the bumps. In the corners, the bars come into play again, reducing body roll to a level determined by the suspension calibration that you select with the cockpit-mounted switch. This option is worth every penny you pay for it.

If you want to further reduce unsprung weight, opt for the PCCB system (Porsche carbon ceramic brakes). Taken together, these trick carbon-ceramic rotors and their respective calipers are said to weigh less than half that of a standard setup with steel rotors. It's worth every thousand of the multiple thousands it costs if you attend track days, but the Panamera seems unlikely to see such duty.

Stir in Some Horsepower
There's a 32-valve, DOHC 4,806cc V8 engine under the Panamera's hood, and it's rated at 393 horsepower at 6,500 rpm and makes 369 pound-feet of torque from 3,500 rpm to 5,000 rpm. Twin turbochargers pump the output of the Turbo model's V8 to 493 hp.

The 2010 Porsche Panamera comes with a seven-speed, dual-clutch PDK automated manual transmission, but this is an all-new two-shaft design rather than the three-shaft unit featured in the new 911, so it fits down the long, slender transmission tunnel without hogging much interior space. Porsche promises that the Panamera S should get to 60 mph from a standstill in a bit less than 4.0 seconds. We're kind of disappointed that no manual transmission will be available, though.

Clearly, the Panamera has performance chops. But it's relatively fuel-efficient, too. No official EPA figures exist yet, but European ratings translate to 15 mpg urban (city) and 30 mpg extra-urban (highway) for the S. One of the reasons is the Panamera's use of a simple stop-start system for the engine, so the engine automatically shuts down at traffic signals and restarts when the driver releases the brakes. A traditional starter motor with a beefed-up duty cycle does the work here, taking cues from the engine control software. This hybrid-style technology is already appearing in a lot of different cars in Europe and you can expect to see it here in the U.S.

But How Does It Drive?
Just as Porsche warned, we're unable to get behind the steering wheel of a Panamera under power. As a consolation prize, however, the engineers offer up a "taxi ride" around their test track. And by taxi ride, they mean that we get to sit in the backseat while a Porsche factory test pilot hurtles the car around the narrow, guardrail-lined Weissach test track. We figure this is some kind of cruel attempt to make us lose our lunch one hour before we're actually scheduled to eat it.