The Car Launch series / pt.4: Porsche Panamera
7 July 2009
A few days ago I went to Munich to test drive the new 4-door car from Porsche, the Panamera. Whilst most of Western Europe was basking in hot sunshine, we arrived in Bavaria in the middle of a week of constant rain. Luckily enough, the skies cleared up long enough for us to have a chance to enjoy the unrestricted Autobahn on the way to our hotel-spa, the Schloss Elmau, at the foot of the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest peak. Porsche opted to send us on a route that included roads that were the obvious terrain of choice for a car of that size (i.e. fast long stretches of highway), but they also included in their plan some much narrower, winding and twisty mountain roads. Whilst I’ve driven one of the Panamera’s main rivals in similar hills (namely the Maserati Quattroporte in Tuscany), I have to say that Porsche’s claim to have invented a new class is not far off the mark. Sweeping through tight bends with the car switched into Sport Plus mode, you forget very quickly that you are actually driving a full-size sedan. Until the Aston Martin Rapide comes out, the Panamera may indeed be in a class of its own.
We stayed in a very Bavarian-looking gigantic hotel, hidden at the end of a semi-private Alpine road:
The Scloss-Elmau was fully booked for a few weeks by Porsche, a standard practice on important car launches. This also meant that the rooftop infinity pool was pretty much empty (car journalists aren’t always the fittest kind):
The foreground of the hotel:
Our gold Panamera Turbo, with the hotel behind it:
Another gold Porsche found on the street – one they would rather forget I suspect:
Nice detail: the key is in the shape of the car:
And even nicer detail: the retractable spoiler expands in a few seconds from a flat surface:
