One Week With a 2020 Porsche Cayenne Turbo Coupe Has Me Rethinking Fast SUV Things

As a lead up to last year’s Best Driver’s Car, we did a Super SUV shootout. The winner, the Lamborghini Urus, went on to place ninth, ahead of the BMW M850i, but behind the Bentley Continental GT V8 at BDC. The second-place car in the Super SUV comparo was the Porsche Cayenne Turbo.

“Compared to the [winning] Urus,” I wrote, “the Cayenne Turbo feels like it’s been dipped in rubber cement.” There was a fizzing, brimming, palpable excitement to the big (though lighter) Lambo. Forget X factor, the Urus has a triple-X factor. Plus the metaphorical equivalent of sparkling lasers and angels’ trumpets blasting out of every weld. In my personal BDC ranking I had the second-ever SUV from Sant’Agata sitting in seventh. The Cayenne, by contrast, which was quick, accurate, grippy, and pretty good to drive, just felt a bit … mundane. The way previous versions of the 911 Turbo felt. Competent and confident but decidedly not the SUV with a lampshade on its head.

Since then, Porsche has launched a “coupe” version of the Cayenne called—are you sitting down?—the Cayenne Coupe. As you may have surmised, there’s a Turbo version of the Cayenne Coupe, creatively titled the Porsche Cayenne Turbo Coupe. Does this slicked-back version fix the (admittedly) pea-under-the-mattress issues I had with Porsche’s standard crazy SUV? Keep reading.

You may be thinking something like, “Why does this thing even exist?” It’s a question I’ve been asking myself since I first drove the BMW X6 back in April 2008. Long story told quick, the X6 sells at about one tenth the volume of the X5, but it sells for about $5,000 more per vehicle, and the two vehicles roll off the same assembly line, so they cost essentially the same to build. BMW sells about 6,000 X6s in the U.S. per year. That extra $5K multiplied by 6,000 is $30,000,000. While the Cayenne sells at about one third the volume of the X5, the gap between the standard SUV and the Coupe version is about $8,000. That’s $8K of pure, dreamy profit and big money if the 10 percent ratio holds. Mercedes introduced this with the E-Class-based CLS. Humans will pay extra for style, no matter how questionable said style may be. As Cayennes go up in price, the gap between the regular flavor and the Coupe version drops. The top-tier Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid Coupe (what a great name! Not.) is only $2,500 dearer than the Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid. For our purposes, the Cayenne Turbo Coupe starts at $131,450, a $3,600 premium over the plain old Cayenne Turbo. That $3,600 buys you less SUV in terms of metal, rear-seat headroom, and cargo volume. But it does buy you exclusivity. $3,600 seems like a fine price to put on that! Also, as tested, this dayglo Lava Orange Turbo Coupe stickers for $158,460.

Do you get more power? No. More gears? Nope. Does the Coupe look better than the regulation Cayenne? I don’t think it does. In fact, it kinda looks like a fat Macan. All three Porsche SUVs suffer in the looks department from being forced into a tenuous visual connection to the 911. What does a front-engine, four-door SUV have to do with a rear-engine actual coupe? You ever heard the one about a camel being a racehorse designed by committee? One more thing: Whereas the X6 has always and still does look like a mutated version of the more staid X5, the Cayenne Coupe doesn’t look all that different from the normal one. It’s as subtle as a 541-horsepower SUV can get.

Well, surely there must be something different aside from style? There is! I found it buried on page 7 of the 12-page technical document Porsche sent me with the car. The rear track is 0.70 inch wider. You heard it here (probably) first, folks. And yet …

Human memory is a fragile thing. Watch enough procedural courtroom TV shows, and you know that eyewitnesses are particularly untrustworthy. In my mind, the Cayenne Turbo Coupe drives much differently than the Cayenne Turbo. Now, do I feel that way because the two are actually different? Or is it because of the fog of time? Or, most likely, do I like how the Coupe version drives more because I didn’t hop out of it and then climb straight into a Lamborghini Urus with an extra 100 horsepower? What’s 18mm more rear track mean, anyway?

So yeah, I love how this thing boogies. The closest analogue I can think of is the Nissan Juke-R. Remember the Juke-R? If not, here’s the crib notes. Back in 2012, someone at Nissan went AWOL and built a Juke with a GT-R powertrain stuffed into it. The reaction was so overwhelmingly positive, Nissan put it into extreme limited production—four were built at a cost of $590,000 each. Nissan followed the 485-hp Juke-R with the 600-hp Juke-R 2.0 a couple years later (production more than quadrupled to 17 units), but I never drove the sequel. I was lucky enough to have spent one afternoon with the Juke-R on an abandoned airstrip, and well, I loved it. This Cayenne Turbo Coupe is the second SUV that’s ever reminded me of that crazy pinball of an SUV. The other one is the Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio, which placed seventh at our 2018 Best Driver’s Car competition. The Cayenne coupe also happens to make 56 additional horsepower and 133 more lb-ft of torque than the little widebody Nissan.

The Turbo Coupe bobs and weaves. I’m sure the three-chamber air suspension and accompanying steel springs are plenty stiff, but when you’re whipping what’s got to be 2.5 tons of fun (the standard Cayenne Turbo we weighed clocked in at 5,090 pounds) on a twisting canyon road, you get body lean. This is a point of disagreement amongst car geeks, but I like body lean. I’m not saying I’m a fan of bad damping or poorly tuned suspensions. Rather, when you enter a corner, given the choice between a super-stiff suspension that keeps the car upright (or fancy-pants 48-volt systems that artificially keep the vehicle from leaning), I prefer that the thing I’m driving lean—in a controlled manner—into a given corner. Feels better. Now, this Turbo Coupe comes packing PDCC (Porsche Dynamic Chassis Control, a $3,590 option), which uses a 48-volt system to juke (pardon me!) the active anti-roll bars. They call it anti-roll stabilization, but try as it might, PDCC is no match for physics. The Cayenne Turbo Coupe leans just lovely through corners.

Obviously, I’d prefer to be in another Porsche (911 Targa, please), as 98 percent of the time cars drive better than SUVs. That said, there are a handful of great-driving hyper SUVs out there. The magic formula has something to do with a long-travel suspension softness, Newton-defying mass management, too much power, gobs of grip, and some sort of sine qua non magic that only things so right they’re wrong possess. The Juke-R makes the cut; so too does the Stelvio QF. You better believe the Urus is on this list, as is the totally excellent BMW X6 M, the SUV that Lamborghini secretly benchmarked when developing the Urus. We can add this here Porsche Cayenne Turbo Coupe to that tiny list.

I still think I’m right, though I don’t remember the regular flavor Cayenne Turbo driving this way. I remember the 17.3-inch carbon-ceramic front rotors stopping the car effortlessly. I remember the endless tug of the twin-turbo V-8. I remember how even though the eight-speed automatic transmission is supplied by ZF and therefore isn’t Porsche’s own brilliant PDK dual-clutch, the slushbox shifts surprisingly well. But I don’t remember the regular Cayenne Turbo feeling like a gussied-up trophy truck, whereas this one totally does. I don’t remember feeling like I was driving something special. A vehicle that, when asked about by a friend with too much money, would lead me to say, “Yeah, I’d have one.” Bottom line: The Cayenne Turbo Coupe drives better than the Cayenne Turbo. At least $3,600 better.

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