Porsche Macan Turbo

Top Gear

7 days ago

Events (or rather, an event) rather overtook whatever initial observations I had about the latest addition to the TG fleet, a Porsche Macan. Because, on the day this orange Turbo was turning up at Top Gear HQ in the UK, at Porsche HQ in Germany the company was holding its annual press conference.
Now ordinarily, end-of-year financial results don't do much beyond revealing revenues and returns and sending me to sleep, but slowing sales in China, a slower-than-expected transition phase to electric, and supplier disruptions, have rocked the boat for most premium brands in Europe.
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For Porsche, that meant two board members (in charge of sales and marketing, and finance and IT) were replaced earlier this year, while at the press conference it confirmed it was working on a new SUV with combustion and hybrid powertrains. Which might not seem newsworthy at all, but when's the last time since Dieselgate any manufacturer announced an all-new model that wasn't either totally electric, or able to be electric alongside conventional combustion?
Thing is, when Porsche made the decision to make the second-generation Macan electric-only (aka a lifetime ago in R&D terms) everything pointed to mass EV uptake. But in the intervening years, the public hasn't embraced electric like governments and manufacturers had planned, hoped and increasingly prayed.
Moreover, while the electric Taycan was a new model that sat alongside the Panamera, the second-generation Macan has replaced a top-selling petrol model (80k+ sales most years, usually neck-and-neck with the Cayenne) with one that's less accessible. Less accessible because it's £10k pricier, and less accessible because all those urban-dwelling owners without off-street parking are going to find getting energy into it more difficult than filling up with petrol.
The solution is another SUV, which almost certainly will share its underneath bits with Audi's Q5 – just as the Mk1 Macan did. Why? Because Audi has just launched another generation of combustion Q5 (on a new platform Porsche will have access to) and a new, similar-sized electric Q6 e-tron (which shares a different, electric-only platform with the Mk2 Macan).
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It's what Porsche, in retrospect, should have done – but hindsight is a wonderful thing and a Q5/Q6-type dual strategy would have been costly, so Porsche hedged on an electric future when that's what legislation and public sentiment seemed to be leaning toward.
The problem is, reversing the decision will now cost even more. There'll be a drop in annual electric Macan sales, plus a combustion-Macan-sized gap in its sales portfolio until the end of the decade, and the R&D spend of hundreds of millions of pounds to fill said void. And then to top it all off, Porsche probably can't call the new SUV 'Macan' as well, purely to save face.
Let's leave all that now though, because the here and now sees this Porsche Macan on the Top Gear fleet. And whatever turmoil exists around it, it's here on merit, as both the winner of our 'Best EV Sports SUV' category in the 2024 Top Gear EV Awards, and as our 'Performance SUV of the Year' in the 2024 Top Gear Awards. You don't get two such gongs without being properly good, so we're expecting to be impressed in the coming months…