Porsche Macan Turbo: Jeremy Clarkson’s review
Porsche’s Macan Turbo is handsome, fast and expensive... but it isn’t the real deal.
When it’s finished, my new house will be a magnificent stone edifice on a hill. It will have Georgian proportions, an elegant roof line, big sash windows and high-ceilinged rooms where I could get about on a pogo stick without banging my head. The views are fairly spectacular too.
I’m watching it rise majestically out of the ground as we speak and, while it’s exciting, I have an issue. Because while it will appear to be a handsome honey-coloured block of solid four-square splendour, I’ll know that behind the Cotswoldy masonry and the delicate cornicing, the inner walls are made from breeze blocks and the whole thing is held together by steel beams.
Of course this keeps costs down to the point where they are merely eye-watering, and it means I can have much bigger rooms than would ordinarily be possible. Also, I like a steel frame. Steel is a material you can trust, whereas cement is flaky and weak. You don’t make a tank out of cement.
Despite all this, I’ll always know that I’ve created a fake, that my house is not what it appears to be. The corridors will not echo to the ghosts of Victorian children playing tag. There’ll be no sense that Gordon Jackson (Upstairs, Downstairs) ever worked in the back kitchen. Or that now-extinct sheep breeds ever came inside to shelter from the fearsome hilltop winds. I grew up in an old house that felt old. My new one will simply look it and I wonder how that might sit in my head.
To get an idea, I’ve just spent a week in the new Porsche Macan Turbo. Yes, I know, all Porsche Macans are turbos. But this is the turbo Turbo. It doesn’t have a turbo to keep Greta Thunberg happy. It has a turbo – two in fact – to make it fast. They’re blowers that sit on top of the 2.9-litre V6 engine and they’re little and free-spinning so they spool up quickly and do stuff that would make Ms Thunberg very angry. Mind you, this is no great feat.
The end result is a car that, on paper, is pretty fast. But in the real world it isn’t. It doesn’t feel that much faster than the ordinary non-Turbo turbo. Maybe this has something to do with the epic four-wheel-drive system or the wonderful steering or the clever optional electronic drive aid package, but the power and the speed never felt as terrifying as the stopwatch would suggest.
I’d actually call the performance “perfect”. It sets off just fast enough for your passenger to nod sagely and make appreciative noises, but from behind the wheel you never feel as if you’re dancing with the devil on an icy precipice of death. It’s just a bloody good, quick car with bloody good brakes.
It also has a good interior. You sit quite low down, and after you’ve spent 10 minutes moving the super-slo-mo electronically adjusted steering wheel to the right place, the driving position is perfect. So is the gear lever. Unlike almost all other cars these days, it lets you just put it in D and go. You don’t have to do a magic trick with your left hand and tap your nose three times before it’ll set off. BMW could learn a lot from this old-fashioned approach.
However, while the car is ready to go, you’re not, because next to your left thigh, at the bottom of a bank of buttons, is a new one. To understand what it might do, you reach for your reading glasses, which reveal an unusual symbol. It’s not one you’ve seen before. It’s a stylised man having what appear to be billiard balls thrown at his face.
You don’t want this to happen, so you visit YouTube, where someone has made a video explaining everything. Someone has always made a video explaining everything. Usually his name is James May. And you discover that, when pressed, the button causes the air coming into the car to be ionised.
Quick question on that. If it’s a good thing to breathe ionised air, why would they fit a button that allows you to turn the system off? “Today, kids, let’s breathe some diesel exhaust fumes instead.”
Naturally, there is also a button that makes the car noisier. I left that alone. And several that make it more uncomfortable. I left those alone too. I did play with the heater, though, and quickly worked out that it wasn’t very good. It didn’t do “warm”, just “hot” or “freezing”.
Other issues? Well, they’ve fitted a type of USB port that means you’ll have to buy a new cable. And it had a collision avoidance system that I think was designed by my mother. It needed only to spot a snowdrop wiggling gently in the breeze three miles away and it would jam on the brakes. It was alarming and I should like very much to send the man who set it up to prison.
These things aside, though, I liked being in the Macan “actual” Turbo and I liked driving it too. I also liked coming out of the house in the morning to find it sitting there. It was handsome. Maybe the engine could be a bit more charismatic and maybe there could be a bit more space in the back and boot, but, all things considered, it’s a very nice car.
Except for one thing. It’s not a Porsche. It sits on the exact same underpinnings as the old Audi Q5. And I don’t mean the last one. I mean the one before that. This is a car that was designed to compete with the Humber Super Snipe.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that because the engineering on this car was done during the time of Helmut Kohl, all the costs would have been met by now. I’m sure they have, in fact. So on that basis Porsche could sell the Macan for supermarket prices and still make a buck. But it doesn’t. My test car cost 86,000 quid, and if you go mad with the extras you can get the price up beyond 100 grand.
Maybe it’s my Yorkshire upbringing but I don’t think I could cope with that. It turns out that I don’t mind driving an ancient Audi dressed up as a 2020 Porsche. That’s fine. It works very well. And that’s a relief because it means I’ll be happy in my steel-framed Georgian house. I do mind, however, paying Porsche prices for something that isn’t the real deal.
Porsche Macan Turbo
Engine: 2.9-litre turbo-petrol V6 (324kW/550Nm)
Average fuel: 10.0 litres per 100km
Transmission : Seven-speed dual-clutch automatic, all-wheel drive
Price: $142,000
Rating: ★★★
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