#PorscheCayenne

There’s room for debate over whether the Cayenne saved Porsche, but it’s hard to deny the SUV’s impact on the performance automaker’s bottom line. The Cayenne has been available in dozens of configurations over the years, but the GTS has long been offered a solid balance of speed and luxury. Though it was absent for the 2024 model year, Porsche’s bringing it back for 2025 with a range of improvements over the outgoing SUV that make it even more compelling than before.

The point of this feature, since it appears lost on some of you, is to pick out interesting/quirky cars. We don't care if the car is in good quality or not, or if the price is right -- a competing site once had a feature about just that -- or anything like that. We just want to serve up unusual stuff as much as possible.

A manual-transmission 2011 Porsche Cayenne strikes me as unusual. I am not sure I knew this vehicle was ever offered with three pedals.

There may be some debate as to whether the Cayenne saved Porsche, but there’s no denying its popularity. The growing number of powertrain and configuration options attest to that fact, and Porsche recently announced another. The Cayenne S E-Hybrid will land for the 2024 model year and will be available in coupe and SUV body styles. 

We could debate whether the Cayenne saved Porsche until the cows come home, but there’s no denying the SUV’s appeal and popularity in the automaker’s lineup. The SUV’s getting a refresh for 2024, but it’s not the mild facelift we often see in the industry. Porsche’s giving the Cayenne better powertrains, a revised interior with more screens, and upgraded suspension.

Porsche is going electric, shifting decades of motorsport and engineering knowledge to completely novel propulsion systems and platforms. The Taycan arrived in 2020 with mind-bending performance, and we’ve seen spy images of an electric 718, so it’s not a huge surprise to learn that the automaker is planning an electric seven-seat SUV to compete with the latest and greatest from Mercedes and BMW. 

Let it never be said that car companies don’t offer people what they want, because, according to sales data, BMW and Mercedes-Benz haven’t sold zero X4s, X6s, GLE Coupes, and GLC Coupes.

There is a market for four-door SUVs with steeply raked rears. Just because you don’t want one and hate the erroneous application of the word “coupe” (this author belongs in both camps) doesn’t mean your neighbor feels the same way. What you see above is Porsche’s first member of this strange new cabal of vehicles. It’s the Cayenne.

The Cayenne Coupe.

The auto industry has become so unconventional, so bizarro world, that I became momentarily confused after reading a report that Porsche has a Panamera coupe in development.

Automakers don’t develop new coupes. They develop slightly more curvaceous versions of four-door crossovers and SUVs and call them coupes, but they’re certainly not coupes. Thus, I found myself picturing a curvaceous four-door liftback version of a curvaceous four-door liftback. Reality bent and flexed around me and the universe crumbled.

That’s apparently what Porsche is up to, though, and it’s looking like the two-door version of the Panamera — if built — will serve as a spiritual successor to the long departed 928.

On this, TTAC’s authors and TTAC’s audience are largely in agreement: luxury sport utility coupes are not the answer to the vehicular challenges of this age.

So Porsche is probably going to build a Cayenne Coupe.

It’ll probably have four doors. It’ll probably be more expensive than a regular Cayenne. It will almost certainly not be as good or half as attractive as a Porsche Cayenne.

This season’s must-have fashion for high-end automakers is the proposed elimination of diesel-powered engines. Volvo may keep theirs, but only if they’re supplemented by an electrified unit after 2019, and the same is true for both Jaguar and Land Rover. Mercedes-Benz hasn’t been quite so overt about its own diesel death, but it is pressing aggressively toward mild hybrids.

However, no manufacturer has the same incentive to distance itself from diesels as Volkswagen Group. Porsche, Audi, and VW all suffered from the company’s emissions scandal. Moving away from the fuel was to be expected, but Porsche’s chief executive hints diesel death may occur within a year as the company decides the future of the next-generation Cayenne.

When we previewed the new SUV last month, Porsche mentioned a pair of turbocharged gasoline engines but no diesel option. That was because the brand is still investigating whether diesel even has a place in the Cayenne and, by extension, the rest of its fleet.

Porsche revealed a new, third-generation Cayenne on a new platform late last month, but the U.S. arrival of the third version of Porsche’s original SUV won’t take place until the second half of 2018.

While the new Cayenne will be sold in some markets as a MY2018 vehicle, the 2018 Cayenne on this side of the Atlantic is the outgoing Cayenne. Yes, that Cayenne, the Cayenne that’s suffering from a sharp sales decline.

In August 2017, the Cayenne’s gradual and not entirely unpredictable old-age decline was matched to a sudden downward shift from its smaller sibling, as well. Macan sales plunged 29 percent last month. Cayenne volume was down 28 percent. Jointly, the duo lost 1,003 sales, year-over-year.

You know what that means. The overwhelming majority, the lion’s share, most, nearly half, more than a third of the vehicles sold in Porsche’s U.S. showrooms in August 2017 were sports cars. Yes, Porsche still builds sports cars, rather decent ones, in fact. And in August, Porsche’s sports car sales were very healthy indeed.

Though not the first BMW-powered vehicle in our Rare Rides series, and not the first with two doors, it is the first BMW convertible we’ve seen here. And the two aforementioned doors on this little convertible have One Simple Trick up their sleeve — disappearing into the body of the car. It’s the kind of detail you’d only expect on some crazy old Citroën.

But that’s not the only unique aspect of the Z1. Want to learn something?

The Macan may be Porsche’s best-selling vehicle, but it owes all of its success to the Cayenne. When the SUV began production in 2002, we all scoffed and claimed it would never work. But the vehicle’s success has had us feasting on crow for the last 15 years.

About to enter its third generation, the Cayenne doesn’t appear to have changed much at a glance. Appearances are often deceptive, however, and this would be a prime example of the phenomenon. For 2019, the SUV comes equipped with new engines, new brakes, a new transmission, and gobs of added tech.

Visually, Porsche says the “the new Cayenne retains a strong visual connection to its predecessors.” If that’s code for saying it looks nearly identical to the previous model and, by extension, all modern Porsches, then it wasn’t very difficult to decrypt. But the German automaker knows it has an incredibly well-established design language. It’s not about to shake things up for the sake of being different.

In July 2015, for just the second time since arriving in America 15 months ago, the Porsche Macan outsold its bigger brother Cayenne.

Also in July 2015, for the first time since arriving in America 15 months ago, the Porsche Macan was the best-selling Porsche in America.

But is Porsche just using the Macan to appeal to Cayenne buyers who want something smaller or less expensive, thereby cannibalizing Cayenne volume in the United States?

What was once the norm is now so rare that October 2014’s results are bizarrely backwards.

The 911 was Porsche’s best-selling model in the United States in October 2014. Stop the presses. Hold the cheese. Alert the medic. Release the proverbial hounds.

The 911 is by all accounts a sports car, even if it’s softer and plusher and more hushed and more PDK’d than ever before. Indeed, the 911 is not an SUV, the type of vehicle which normally dominates Porsche’s sales charts.

In early 2011, a class action lawsuit was filed against Porsche alleging that the company knowingly installed defective coolant pipes made of nylon into engines of Cayenne model SUV’s. Apparently, the pipes are very likely to fail prematurely resulting in serious engine damage. If the vehicle is out of warranty, customers end up spending big bucks to repair their engines and replace the coolant pipes. The replacement coolant pipes are made of aluminum.