The 2020 Porsche Cayenne GTS brings back its V8 soundtrack and promises driving thrills

Welcome to the new Porsche Cayenne GTS. Now, before we get to the fire. Fire and the condiments sprinkle on your food. Let's have a look at why we are reviewing this at all. You see, I know some of you will be yawning it yet, another SUV thinking just buy an estate. I'm kind of with you, but stick with me partly because the fire bit is quite interesting and has nothing to do with SUVs. And partly because in the context of the modern motoring landscape, SUVs like this are still unafraid really important. Porsche sold 280,000 cars globally in 2019. And around 190,000 of those were cautious to SUVs, the Macan and cayenne, the larger the two sold 86,000 units. And that's not including the newly introduced Cayenne coupe, which sold seven and a half thousand. That puts it somewhere short of BMWs x five at 170,000. But ahead of the Range Rover Sport to 2000 it was also the best selling of its VW MLB Evo platform. stablemates just beating out is q seven, one in front of the VW Touareg and leagues ahead of the Bentley bentayga and Lamborghini erce. So, the Cayenne remains very important for Porsche The Cayenne GTS sits between the Cayenne S and the Cayenne Turbo, so it's potentially the sweet spot of the range. The original GTS had a naturally aspirated V8, then it went to a turbocharged V6 and now we're back to a V8 but we've kept the turbo charges numbers. 454 brake horsepower 457 pounds for to talk about 1800 RPM nought to 60 miles an hour in 4.2 seconds if you spec the sport crono pack so quick enough. quite clearly though you don't buy the GTS just for the extra numbers. You buy it because with the V eight, it sounds rather good. You got a sports exhaust and they've also deleted some of the sound deadening in the back. So if we put it into sport which wakes up the sports exhaust option [SOUND] [SOUND] It sounds pretty good. I still don't think it matches Mercedes four liter turbocharged V8 for sound. But it's mellifluous, nonetheless. As standard, the right height it has been dropped by 20 millimeters and the suspension uses steel springs. However, this particular car has the optional air suspension. In fact, we've got really quite a lot on this car. You see as well as the air suspension, you can also spec rebel steer which we've got. Pccb. So you can actually have two other options of breaks so you get steel a standard. Then you can have the tungsten carbide ones with the white calipers or PCBs, which we've got which are the carbon ceramic brakes. You can also get pdcc which is Porsche dynamic chassis control, which is basically active role system and this car has got an upgrade of wheels from 21 inch to two 22 inches. All in all, a car that started out at 85,000 pounds is now up to 113,000 pounds in the spec. Inside the GTS well you get lashings of Alcantara, which I really love to be honest it just sets the right ambience as soon as you get in the car as soon as you touch that lovely soft material on the steering wheel. It's. It makes me happy. The rest of the interior Well, it's such as almost shy and retiring, almost boring compared to the exterior and it's lovely orange of this car. And talking of hot things. Let's talk about this Porsches name. Cayenne is of course, the type of pepper source of capital of French Guyana, but Let's not get into that now. And if I say pepper, you say, No no pink salt, honestly salt and pepper, and we thought we would bring pepper to salt. Let's ignore the fact that it's not black pepper. It's cayenne pepper which is slightly different but Anyway, molten salt is the most famous type of salt. And that comes from just over there. The Blackwater river Blackwater is actually a corruption of Blackwater as in brackish anyway, they produce the best stuff to sprinkle on your food. And it's been around since 1882. It's family owned by the Osborne's. And what's special about it was less magnesium in it. And you can see that, it's actually a little pyramids. They also coined the phrase sea salt flakes. So now you know, just be the most tenuous link I think I've ever done enough Learn something new pub quiz. No. By the way, if you're looking at the boats behind me and wondering what the maximum waiting depth of a Cayenne on air suspension is, well, I can tell you it's 520 millimeters 20 millimeters more than an old defender. It can also tow up to three and a half thousand kilos, so you can trail your dinghy or that jetski game show in the 90s. Okay, practicality. This has got 772 litres of boot space with the rear seats on which is pretty enormous. That's about 130 liters more than an E Class estate. Slightly less Nico's say when he put the seats down but still 1700 liters is pretty massive which is what you'd hope for If you're buying this sorta of thing, one of the slightly old school feature in here, is having this gear selector which I rather like. Changing gear with this, has been quite fine.>> The actual shift to high speed auto is merely okay in terms of snaping us, but it's just rather fun having the option to pop up and down the ratios with the lever rather than the paddles. Makes me bemoan the little toggle switch you get a 992 even more. [BLANK_AUDIO] Just makes it a bit more involving. [BLANK_AUDIO] If you put things into Sport Plus, then it gets even more, Extraordinary in terms of the grip button, there is a sense that it's just trying to roll lunch in the road into submission. Weighing 2145 kilos. It's never going to be balletic. This car. Impressive?. Yes. Interactive. Not exactly. In fact, how I've enjoyed it most is I've got the individual setting on the engine ramp right off and then the chassis and it's more relaxed setting so you've got that bit more fluidity in the suspension. It's a, something you might have noticed I kind of like doing with cars where it does let you tailor it. And that seems to be the most fun because then you can actually just work with the road a bit more use the fact you've got the extra suspension travel of an An SUV the engine does need to be read you've got to keep it and certainly above three ideally above 4000 RPM makes it powered around by 6000 RPM so it does reward being revved which is quite nice actually. Steering is nice and accurate, something on the best portion staring but it's still pretty good you can feel what's going on. The front end. You just have to manage the weight over the lows though. Now one thing I haven't mentioned yet, is fuel consumption. But I've got a particular location in mind to talk about that. [MUSIC] Donna is what remains of runway one RF Bradwell Bay. Now this is a station that was built in the Second World War and been disused really since 1946. But what's really interesting about it is that this is the only RF fighter station to use fighter during the Second World War. Now Fido is not a dog. Fado is the Royal Air Force's folk investigation and dispersal operation or fog intensive dispersal of if you prefer the slightly more Yoda translation of the acronym. Now, in the Second World War, they had real problems with fog and specifically, I suppose smoke because of all the coal they were burning all the heavy industry. And that was a problem, certainly because pilots couldn't take off but more importantly, because they couldn't land. Now, they came up with a system which I think demonstrates the sheer sort of extravagance and ingenuity of the Second World War. What they did is they laid two pipelines, either side of the runway, and they pumped kerosene or petrol into them. And then they lift them. Sometimes a man would do it sometimes they'd hang up the back of a jeep and just have a long taper effectively. Once you had the lines of fire up and running, it would disperse the fog in about six minutes because it just burnt off the water vapor, and so the planes could come in and land safely. It saves thousands of lives. If they were going to be implemented at Heathrow after the war, but the trouble was, it was just too expensive because someone like this would use about 450,000 litres of fuel every hour. Some bigger places use up to 800,000 Leeches. Now if we assume 450,000 litres, this has a 90 litre fuel tank, so that's 5000 tanks of fuel for kind GTS in one hour. Now if we go with a range of about 400 miles because we're assuming 14 litres per 100 kilometre which is about just over 20 mpg in this That is enough to do 2 million miles in a kayak GTS. And that has been pretty pessimistic. If we assume a lifetime of 100,000 miles for a Cayenne GTS, you could have 20 kind GTS running for their entire lifetime off the fuel burnt in one hour from Fido. Pretty extraordinary. I think you'd agree today. Well, this whole site is going to be taken over by a new nuclear power station, replacing the one just over there. Which is a bit of shame right? [MUSIC] [SOUND] So what to conclude about the Cayenne GTs. I feel slightly conflicted about this car ready, because as I said in the past these sorts of things, there is a certain guilty pleasure. I mean, it sounds. Sounds good. It goes down the road incredibly impressively. It's hard not to fall for some of its charms. But what I kept thinking is that really perhaps in the same way you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, you shouldn't judge a vehicle by its press car specs. See the trouble with this in the spec that it's in is that well, you'd never take it off road, would you?.I mean, look at the carbon brakes restart, you just wouldn't wouldn't risk it would you?. Nearly 7000 pounds worth of brakes do not want to meet with mud and gravel. And yet with the suspension and its various terrain modes engaged, the Cayenne can be surprisingly capable off road. And it seems a shame not to be able to tap into that denuding of that offered ability is a bit like buying a convertible in the building group shot. So instead of trying to spec this up like some sort of track toy, because let's face it, really you're never going to take this on a track. Why not make the most of the fact that it is still an SUV, the point of it being SUV rather than estate and actually fit the smaller wheels. Perhaps some tires that can do a little more mud plugging than what's on here at the moment. That way, you've got off road capability but wave. [SOUND]. Great sounding V8. [SOUND] The ability to charge across a field with a soundtrack [SOUND] That I like [SOUND]