The Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT is the undisputed king of the 'Ring. But is it the best fast SUV for the road?
when referring to a car they’ve driven. Anything can be good in isolation. If I’d driven a Ford Model T today, I could very well conclude that,, its performance was strong, its cabin refinement exemplary and the choice of body colours wide-ranging. After all,, you are using one reference point: the flipping car you are sitting in. So the only car it has to beat, then, is itself. It's an utterly meaningless phrase if you want to know how good a car is.
For the record, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to get in the back of a Rapide – not officially, at least, with all the doors closed and someone sat in front of me. Anyway, to go with its generous rear legroom, the DBX707 has an excess of rear headroom as well. The Turbo GT’s sloping roof line isn’t as accommodating, but it has enough headroom for me to sit up or lean back against the headrest, although it does have two seats only in the back. The Aston has three.
Whether you prefer the Porsche’s gearbox paddles, which are mounted behind the steering wheel, to the larger, fixed paddles on the Aston’s column is, I’d say, another highly subjective one. Either setup works well, and both cars have tactile metal paddles instead of cheap, naff, plastic flippers. It’s a little easier to operate the Aston’s basic functions, though, because it relies less on touch-sensitive buttons for the main ones than the Porsche.
Right, the driving experience. And if it’s all been fairly equal between the two up to this point, this is where they begin to diverge. Well, apart from straight-line performance, because they are both brutally fast. Talking about 0-62mph seems a bit pointless here, because by the time you’ve counted off three-and-a-bit seconds in your head, you’ve sailed past that milestone in either car and you’re well into the kind of numbers that will have you incarcerated.
The Porsche has a more progressive throttle response, while the Aston’s is more binary to begin with – more switch-like at the start of its travel. From then on, it’s easy to meter out the force easily. The Porsche’s gearbox is more finessed as well. It’s not a PDK but an eight-speed slusher, yet you'd be hard-pressed to tell from its response and snappy shift speeds. It is a very good auto indeed, whether it’s left to its own devices, or with you taking control.
The Turbo GT, meanwhile, doesn’t feel that well tied down. In the softest of its air suspension settings, the body has all sorts of lateral movements – even in a straight line down a motorway it’s jiggling left and right pretty much constantly. Throw in a few bumps midway through a tight turn when you’re asking a lot of the tyres and it can, on occasion, buck quite nervously.
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