The leap forward

Happy 21st birthday to the Porsche Cayenne, and especially the Turbo. I remember its birth well, though not for the reasons you might expect. I was the road-test editor on Autocar magazine at the time, and the first Porsche SUV was our most anticipated new car of the year. There were some fears that the Cayenne might be another heavy, high-riding off-roader, but rereading what we wrote at the time, the doubters needn’t have worried.

We didn’t just think the Cayenne was good; we struggled to comprehend how Porsche had overcome an SUV’s dynamic disadvantages to produce something that drove so well. ‘Busy unlearning everything about mass and centre of gravity,’ my then-colleague Chris Harris wrote. The acceleration from that 450 PS turbo V8 made us ‘laugh out loud’ long before LOLing was a thing. The Cayenne’s victory against its rivals in a group test was ‘utterly inevitable’.

I asked a junior member of my team to get our test car airborne at the test track for the cover of the magazine. Unaccustomed to such traction and power, he hit the ramp that we used for jump shots a lot faster than usual and put the Cayenne six feet in the air. The car – the first Turbo in the country – was destroyed on re-entry but held up extraordinarily well, and my colleague was unharmed. Never having thought to drop a Cayenne from that height, Porsche repatriated the remains to Germany to be examined.

We didn’t need the unintentional crash test to know that the Cayenne Turbo was not only a good car but one of the most significant Porsche would make. And having seen how it fared when dropped, I now trust my family to a 911 of the same vintage with complete confidence.