Porsche Panamera 4 e-Hybrid Sport Turismo - long-term review

As the miles accumulate the big Porsche PHEV continues to impress. I love the fact that every control and switch feels like it will outlast my time on this planet. Gone is the plethora of buttons that ran down the centre of the previous generation and in its place is a clean and simple flat glass surface with immaculately laid out buttons, each of which buzzes with haptic feedback when you touch it. Every touch point and control surface has been considered for its feel, weighting and the material it’s created from and has a weight and sophistication that exudes quality.

The more miles we accumulate the more the unparalleled build quality is replicated in the way the Porsche tackles any journey. It oozes solidity, dependability and manages one of the most diverse and complex powertrains with a mass of processing power that makes it one of the most broadly talented and fascinating cars I’ve ever driven.

Want to slip silently through the night? Deploy E-Mode, for electric-only driving. With one twist to the right on the rotary knob and you’re into Hybrid which will seek out the most efficient deployment of the hybrid system's energy. Twizzle further into Sport and with a fully charged battery you have 455bhp, AWD and instant power delivery, a further twist into Sport + and the whole system becomes more urgent and focussed on pure speed. It really is a car that delivers a solution for every driving situation.

But despite its on-paper engineering brilliance, try as we might we simply can’t get the Panamera beyond 38mpg in normal driving conditions with the car set to Hybrid Auto. That’s half of the claimed figure of 76.3-80mpg.

This isn’t surprising. The complex maths used to calculate PHEV MPG is a minefield and has always led to ambitious claims never delivered in The Real World. If you were to only drive the Panamera 4 E-Hybrid Sport Turismo short distances, you could just use E mode constantly. So, you’d exceed the claimed MPG easily, and that’s basically the way that the WLTP test is configured. Still for a number of owners who chose the Panamera due to its urban low emissions, the Panamera will spend the week being a pure EV then switching into a hybrid at the weekend for longer distance trips and avoidance of the patchy charging infrastructure. Handy.

That is the main advantage of the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, or PHEV. It provides the owner with a vehicle that changes depending on your needs. A diversity that also futureproofs the vehicle against the constantly shifting legislation of the landscape. A good thing when you’re dropping £120k on a car.

It’s not the Panamera’s fault that the system still hasn’t found a way of providing a meaningful measurement of the combined MPG of a PHEV, and Porsche’s figures are far more realistic than those claimed by others (I’m looking at you, ‘240mpg’ Vauxhall Grandland.) But accept this, in the real world a PHEV provides a diverse one device serves all solution to future transport, not MPG that can compete with the claimed figures.