Yahoo Autos 2024 Porsche Panamera First Drive Review: Porsche does luxury
SEVILLE, Spain – The Panamera has been called many things. To its stewards, it is the Porsche of luxury sedans. To detractors, it’s yet another symbol of the once-great sports car builder’s diluted modern mission. To its engineers, it’s a chance to prove that the Porsche emblem represents excellence in any context, and to do so, they’re willing to do just about anything short of reinventing the wheel.
At this rate, humankind’s greatest mobility epiphany may be in jeopardy too, because the 2024 Porsche Panamera doesn’t seem to roll at all. While 2024 represents only a heavy revision of the Panamera’s fundamental platform, it’s also a culmination of a generation’s worth of engineering lessons and technological advancement at a time when electrification is doling out large helpings of both at a breakneck pace.
But the 2024 Porsche Panamera isn’t merely a technological tour-de-force. Its engineers weren’t keen to discuss ADAS or the future of self-driving. The Panamera may be a luxury conveyance, but it’s still engineered to be best appreciated from behind the wheel, no matter how enticing the upholstery on the rear split-bucket bench may be.
Houndstooth interior or not, the Panamera is not a carpet in the literal sense, but its suspension is indeed magical and the specs bear out the airborne metaphor. It’ll do 0-to-60 in about 3 seconds on the way to a top speed north of 195 mph; that’s flying, certainly. But lithe aerialist, the Panamera is not. Its wide fenders may be designed to mimic the 911’s, but with 670 horsepower and 685 pound-feet of torque, Panamera Turbo E-Hybrid might be a bit more Höllenkatze than Carrera.
Those figures may not seem far off from the last gen’s, but remember, this isn’t a clean-sheet redesign. The base and E-Hybrid models are still built around a twin-turbo V6, while the Turbo E-Hybrid utilizes a V8 alongside its hybrid components. The V8’s turbos are single-scroll units now rather than twins, and the PDK now has a motor inside its housing, but the general layout of things hasn’t changed all that much.
The real story here is Porsche’s new suspension — the rare bit of wizardry that actually makes the complexity of an adaptive suspension seem worthwhile. We’re talking standard dual-chamber air suspension with the option to upgrade to the Turbo E-Hybrid and its Active Ride, which ventures into no-anti-roll-bars levels of silliness.
Anti-roll bars — aka stabilizer bars, sway bars, or “that stupid thing I have to drop the cradle to install” — create a physical link between the opposing corners of a suspension. They reduce body roll by tying the motions of the two corners together. The stiffer the anti-roll bar, the less independently (or the more like a solid axle) your suspension will behave.
In other words, anti-roll bars inherently restrict the very advantages that make independent suspension designs worthwhile in the first place. But without anti-roll bars (or an equivalent stand-in), you end up with a smooth but floaty — and decidedly un-Porsche-like — ride.
Fortunately, Porsche has Porsche money, and with Porsche money you can afford to replace anti-roll bars with something superior. What most cars rely on their stabilizer bars for, Porsche’s Active Ride can do better, and we have the Panamera’s new onboard 48-volt electrical architecture to thank for it.
What does electrical architecture have to do with suspension design? Well, to implement a system that can independently control the air springs and hydraulic dampers simultaneously while also simulating the effects of an anti-roll bar, you need a lot of sensors, along with the bandwidth and computing power to crunch all the data they produce. Porsche’s new 48-volt standard not only provides the necessary bandwidth, but doubles as a weight-saving measure of sorts. By increasing the voltage (what amounts to the “speed” of electricity), the Panamera’s various sensors and modules can talk to each other at lower latencies while using thinner conductors. Like paint, wiring harnesses add weight.
With this upgrade, Porsche’s electrical engineers designed a system to work in what might as well be real-time. The result is a computer that knows what you’re doing before you’re fully committed to doing it, allowing it to act both reactively and predictively. With a suspension this smart and versatile, the Panamera joins a rare niche of high-performance luxury cars that don’t have anti-roll bars at all. McLaren made waves with a hydraulic setup that accomplished the same thing in the MP4-12C and has evolved it since. Rivian’s trucks employ something similar, as do some Mercedes offerings and the Ferrari Purosangue.
