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More Porsche Panamera
Monday, August 17, 2009

Way back when the web was at version 2.0.1.2 (January '09 for the rest of us) I took a look, or was that a swipe, at the Porsche Panamera.

I don't think my views on this have altered much. If you buy a Panamera, the stats say this isn't your only car. The typical 911 owner has 3 cars, if I recall my stats correctly, and this is part of Porsche's ploy to get more wallet share from each customer.

But if you are going to buy 3 cars, wouldn't you want them to be the best-in-class at the task you intend for them?

This was my point when I looked at a Panamera competitor, the Aston Martin Rapide . My comments there were focusing on these cars as big saloons, but the other niche they are targeting is the 4-seater coupe market where cars like the Mercedes CL (sorry, soon to be S-Class coupe), Maserati GranTurismo and the like are popular. And again, to labour the point, whilst the Rapide may make headway against that market because it is dead sexy, the Panamera is, well, ugly.

Interestingly, all the reviews seem to indicate that despite the terrible looks, the car drives like a Porsche. Checkout the reviews from Drive.com.au and AutoExpress.

Also worth checking out are these videos:

Top Gear's Panamera vs the postman (which will likely get yanked as it isn't BBC official material)