cometguy
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2018
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- Location
- New England, USA
- Vehicles
- '21 Taycan CT4; '18 Panamera 4 ST E-Hybrid (past); Cayenne 4 Electric (planned)
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Today (2026 July 25) I got a heads up that Cayenne Electrics have been showing up this week in dealerships here in New England. I went to Porsche Burlington to sit in a showroom Turbo for a while and got a quick test drive in a Cayenne 4S (they had sold their only Cayenne base already, which is what I'm interested in). I was able to drive several miles in the Cayenne 4S but had to surrender it upon return to the dealership without really exploring its interior because there were other people waiting to test drive it (apparently their only Cayenne available for test drives today). So I went back to the Turbo in the showroom to fiddle some more with the screens, physical switches, and check out the rear seats and cargo area.
I'll give some thoughts and photos here, with comparisons to my experiences with Macan 4 and Taycan CT4. Both the Cayenne Electrics that I sat in today had black or gray interiors and Vanadium Gray Metallic exteriors. In the sunlight, the Vanadium Gray really stood out, and looked much better than in the configurator (and seemed a little lighter gray than the similar paint on Cayenne ICEVs/PHEVs in the past, but perhaps that's not real). I'd been thinking I'd special order a blue or green exterior (which is some $800 more), but I might just go with Vanadium Gray now.
The salesman (Joe) seemed more knowledgeable about Porsche than many I've dealt with over the years, and he had just gotten back from a Porsche ambassador event in Denver to introduce the new Cayenne Electric (in the past week or so, I think). He told me something I hadn't heard before about the Trump tariffs: that Porsche has folded them in to the prices, which is why the prices have all jumped hugely in the past 1.5 years, and that they didn't want to put it as a line item instead on the monroney label or build sheet (which I'd vastly prefer). I had thought that the tariffs were off/dead and that they were never levied on German cars, despite Trump's threats, and I thought that the courts had overturned all of Trump's tariffs -- but Joe told me no, that the tariffs are levied and they're built into the USA car prices. I'm assuming that that means that Canadian Porsche prices are now lower than American prices. Joe didn't know what the tariff increase was (as a percentage of original MSRP). I've also heard that only automakers can get tariff money back via application for refund (from the court orders), which is a shame because it would be nice for them to put the tariff on the build sheet and then let owners/buyers of Porsches apply for tariff refunds later, when possible. It's also a shame because Porsche may be able to get that tariff refund, not pass it along to buyers, and just keep it as profit (though I note that Porsche is probably losing a LOT of sales because of their massively higher prices in the US in the last year, moving forward). The tariffs almost have me priced out of the market for even a special-order Cayenne base with no premium package, all-metal roof, etc.
So now to the Cayenne and my first impressions. I've been watching lots of YouTube videos of the Cayenne Electric by the usual journalists (Out of Spec, Tom/State of Charge,, Autogefühl, etc.), so was getting pretty familiar with the vehicles. But sitting in one and driving it is quite different, of course. I really like the curved infotainment screen and the physical buttons/switches for climate controls and audio (the latter of which are in the Macan EV but not the Taycan, even the second-gen Taycan, sadly). Even the Turbo (as well as the 4S) Cayenne has dual sun visors for both front seats -- something that I can't figure out why they're absent from all other Porsche models (they've been in the Cayenne ICEVs for a long time now also). The Cayenne's instrument panel is much more configurable than in the Macan, but I'd still like to see it possible to configure the tubes more there (as was the case in my Panamera and Macan from before 2020). The mirror-adjustment panel is in a new location, further on the door toward the front and on a slope -- kinda awkward to get at, but much better than being in a touchscreen.
The Cayenne also has the stupid design for the cabin vents, where you have to point them via computer/touchscreen instead of having manual vents (i.e., bad like the Taycan, but I think that the Macan has manual vents?). Can't figure out why Porsche keeps doing that; I've never heard anybody (owner or journalist) who thinks that having to go to a touchscreen to move the vents is a remotely-ok idea. The exterior mirrors are bigger and give more visibility into blind spots than those on my Taycan. The frunk is larger than I expected -- lots of space there; it opens automatically electronically now when you push the frunk button on the key fob (something I think is dangerous, without a secondary latch that you formerly had for a 2-step process of opening the front hood).
The rear view out the back window of the Cayenne Electric is OK but not great; the back seat rests are quite bulky and intrude on the view. The front-seat storage is pretty good -- way better than in the Taycan, and different but similar to the much-improved storage in the Macan. Putting the gear shifter onto the dashboard to the right of the steering wheel was a master design idea by Porsche, freeing up center storage space, and much better than putting gear shifters on a stalk on the steering wheel. Rear seats are much more spacious in the Cayenne Electric than the Macan EV, of course. And it's easier getting in and out of all four seats in the Cayenne than my Taycan. Also, with typical front-seat seat positions, both the Macan and Taycan can have problems with the back seats folding down, but with the Cayenne, because there's so much more space in the back seat, it seems much less of a problem as to how the front seats are positioned regarding the back seats folding down without issue.
But the Cayenne is a boat compared to my Taycan, and not nearly as nimble (naturally). The Macan 4 had really lousy acceleration -- much worse than in my Taycan CT4 (which really shocked me because I figured that the "4" trims would get similar felt acceleration across the Porsche models), which was one reason that I ended up not keeping my special-order Macan 4 (which the dealership quickly sold to somebody else). I won't be able to test-drive a Cayenne base Electric until about a month from now, but the 4S's acceleration seemed also much more lethargic than my CT4's acceleration -- again surprising me and making me wonder what the base Cayenne will be like. The Cayenne's weight isn't that much more than the Taycan (I think only about 500 lbs or so), but it feels much heavier to me, probably because of the higher center-of-gravity. Again, I expected that the Cayenne 4S would accelerate at least as well as my Taycan 4, but it does not. So the cockpit in the Cayenne is much better than the cockpits of both the Taycan and the Macan EV, and it's more spacious all around inside, but it also feels much larger when driving it. Put the Cayenne cockpit in the Taycan, and you've got a much better Taycan.
The Cayennes have NACS port on the driver side and a J1772 port on the passenger side, which is ok (though I wish there were instead a full NACS port with Telsa AC port on one side, and a full CCS port on the other side -- that would be great design, and I'd pay like $2k extra for that as an option). There just are too many CCS stations out there still in 2026 and not as many NACS stations outside of Tesla, as I've found on my regular cross-country roadtrips (had one in May to upper Great Lakes and another once coming up to the south Atlantic) -- and CCS charging plugs are going to be around for a VERY long time in a big way because there are so many CCS cars on the roads now (NACS in non-Teslas only became a thing in the past year, and those NACS cars are a large minority of all the non-Tesla BEVs on American roads today, and nobody wants to use an adapter if they don't have to). There's a box on the electronic sliding port doors to touch to get the charging-port doors to open; only one can be open at a time, and there's no way to close them manually (I guess that they close automatically after some set amount of time). But if you open one port door, then go to the other side and touch the box to open that door, it will pause a few seconds, close the opposite-site port door that was open and then open the latest port door that you chose to open -- so that's good. I still worry about electronic doors' software/hardware breaking and not being able to open a door when you need to.
In the rear of the Turbo Cayenne, there are lots of electronic buttons -- two for putting down the two sides of the rear seats electronically, and two for moving them back up electronically; they do move much more slowly than if you were to do so manually (not sure if manual movement is an option -- didn't check that but assume that it is from the side doors). The Turbo also had the electrochromic glass in the roof, and there are several virtual buttons in the infotainment screen to change the glass opacity as well as a single "button" up by the mirror (next to the buttons for cabin lighting, etc.) that you can use to toggle through the different roof-glass opacities. My complaint with all these automotive electrochromic glass designs is that they only go transparent or translucent, not opaque; I wish that they'd have an option to go opaque like the electrochromic glass in passenger windows of Boeing Dreamliner jets -- big mistake by the automakers. And there's no longer a moving inside mesh sun blocker in the Cayenne Electrics, so there's no way to shut out sunlight from the roof glass if you don't get the electrochromic glass (unless you buy some special-fit second-party glass blocker like "HeatShield", as I did with my Taycan to keep out unwanted heat/light in the summer).
Phone storage and placement of USB ports for them in the front storage area is excellent in the Cayenne (perhaps not as good as in the Macan EV from my experience, but the Taycan has literally nothing useful for phones). I would order any of these vehicles with a center-dash compass (which includes a digital clock). The clocks that Porsche has aren't that great (only a second hand, not hour and minute hands, despite having a 12-hour analogue appearance), and having a bare center dashboard doesn't look as good to me. My wife likes seeing a clock up on the dashboard at all times, and I agree with that. The passesnger screen in the Cayenne 4S is visible to the driver when the car is parked, but not while the car is in motion -- even with the front passenger seat occupied. I like being able to see the passenger screen when I'm driving my '21 Taycan CT4, because my wife will have the audio/music displayed there which I can easily see at a (safe) glance while I keep driving things like map/navigation on the center infotainment screen. But Porsche has apparently decided that they want to regulate what their high-paying drivers can and cannot see while driving.... sigh... (How many Taycan drivers with passenger screens have gotten into accidents because they looked over at the passenger screen while driving? I'd wager zero.)
The two Cayennes that I sat in both had < 50 miles on the odometer, and their equivalent ranges on a full charge were both around 250 miles, which was surprising to me. I know that you have to drive, charge and discharge, for a few hundred miles to get the computer predictions for range in good order. Joe told me that the cars arrive at the dealership off the ships with < 10% SoC, so they're charged to full at the dealership for the first time. From journalist YouTube videos, I've been surprised at the huge range of ranges: Kyle and Tom have shown basically 350 miles of range on a full charge (extropolated from both their test runs and just general driving showing the predicted range and SoC on the screens) on their Cayenne Electrics (both prototypes and now new sellable cars), whereas almost all the European journalists have shown Cayennes in the last couple of months to have only 220-270 miles of range, even with thousands of miles on the odometer. Kyle and Tom got 350 miles on two different Cayennes last October in California running 70 mph. So I don't understand why there's such a disparity between the Europeans and the Americans in Cayenne Electric range; it's a big deal if real -- doesn't make sense.
Joe told me that the dealership had no say in how the first "Introduction" Cayenne Electrics are spec'd, and they're pretty much spec'd to the hilt. The Turbo MSRP that I sat in costs $202k USD, and the 4S costs $160k; they aren't giving any discounts off MSRP at this dealership and have already sold one or two of the intro models. I don't like the rear light strip, which now has the PORSCHE lettering lit up in red when the lights are on; I don't know about others, but I am embarrassed to have this tacky "Mercedes"-like glowing lettering/badging on the car's exterior. This is new for 2026, as I understand it -- standard on Cayenne. It's also tacky on a new Taycan CT4 that I was considering a couple of months ago. Porsche should give us the option to have the PORSCHE lettering not lit up when the lights are on.
I'll give some thoughts and photos here, with comparisons to my experiences with Macan 4 and Taycan CT4. Both the Cayenne Electrics that I sat in today had black or gray interiors and Vanadium Gray Metallic exteriors. In the sunlight, the Vanadium Gray really stood out, and looked much better than in the configurator (and seemed a little lighter gray than the similar paint on Cayenne ICEVs/PHEVs in the past, but perhaps that's not real). I'd been thinking I'd special order a blue or green exterior (which is some $800 more), but I might just go with Vanadium Gray now.
The salesman (Joe) seemed more knowledgeable about Porsche than many I've dealt with over the years, and he had just gotten back from a Porsche ambassador event in Denver to introduce the new Cayenne Electric (in the past week or so, I think). He told me something I hadn't heard before about the Trump tariffs: that Porsche has folded them in to the prices, which is why the prices have all jumped hugely in the past 1.5 years, and that they didn't want to put it as a line item instead on the monroney label or build sheet (which I'd vastly prefer). I had thought that the tariffs were off/dead and that they were never levied on German cars, despite Trump's threats, and I thought that the courts had overturned all of Trump's tariffs -- but Joe told me no, that the tariffs are levied and they're built into the USA car prices. I'm assuming that that means that Canadian Porsche prices are now lower than American prices. Joe didn't know what the tariff increase was (as a percentage of original MSRP). I've also heard that only automakers can get tariff money back via application for refund (from the court orders), which is a shame because it would be nice for them to put the tariff on the build sheet and then let owners/buyers of Porsches apply for tariff refunds later, when possible. It's also a shame because Porsche may be able to get that tariff refund, not pass it along to buyers, and just keep it as profit (though I note that Porsche is probably losing a LOT of sales because of their massively higher prices in the US in the last year, moving forward). The tariffs almost have me priced out of the market for even a special-order Cayenne base with no premium package, all-metal roof, etc.
So now to the Cayenne and my first impressions. I've been watching lots of YouTube videos of the Cayenne Electric by the usual journalists (Out of Spec, Tom/State of Charge,, Autogefühl, etc.), so was getting pretty familiar with the vehicles. But sitting in one and driving it is quite different, of course. I really like the curved infotainment screen and the physical buttons/switches for climate controls and audio (the latter of which are in the Macan EV but not the Taycan, even the second-gen Taycan, sadly). Even the Turbo (as well as the 4S) Cayenne has dual sun visors for both front seats -- something that I can't figure out why they're absent from all other Porsche models (they've been in the Cayenne ICEVs for a long time now also). The Cayenne's instrument panel is much more configurable than in the Macan, but I'd still like to see it possible to configure the tubes more there (as was the case in my Panamera and Macan from before 2020). The mirror-adjustment panel is in a new location, further on the door toward the front and on a slope -- kinda awkward to get at, but much better than being in a touchscreen.
The Cayenne also has the stupid design for the cabin vents, where you have to point them via computer/touchscreen instead of having manual vents (i.e., bad like the Taycan, but I think that the Macan has manual vents?). Can't figure out why Porsche keeps doing that; I've never heard anybody (owner or journalist) who thinks that having to go to a touchscreen to move the vents is a remotely-ok idea. The exterior mirrors are bigger and give more visibility into blind spots than those on my Taycan. The frunk is larger than I expected -- lots of space there; it opens automatically electronically now when you push the frunk button on the key fob (something I think is dangerous, without a secondary latch that you formerly had for a 2-step process of opening the front hood).
The rear view out the back window of the Cayenne Electric is OK but not great; the back seat rests are quite bulky and intrude on the view. The front-seat storage is pretty good -- way better than in the Taycan, and different but similar to the much-improved storage in the Macan. Putting the gear shifter onto the dashboard to the right of the steering wheel was a master design idea by Porsche, freeing up center storage space, and much better than putting gear shifters on a stalk on the steering wheel. Rear seats are much more spacious in the Cayenne Electric than the Macan EV, of course. And it's easier getting in and out of all four seats in the Cayenne than my Taycan. Also, with typical front-seat seat positions, both the Macan and Taycan can have problems with the back seats folding down, but with the Cayenne, because there's so much more space in the back seat, it seems much less of a problem as to how the front seats are positioned regarding the back seats folding down without issue.
But the Cayenne is a boat compared to my Taycan, and not nearly as nimble (naturally). The Macan 4 had really lousy acceleration -- much worse than in my Taycan CT4 (which really shocked me because I figured that the "4" trims would get similar felt acceleration across the Porsche models), which was one reason that I ended up not keeping my special-order Macan 4 (which the dealership quickly sold to somebody else). I won't be able to test-drive a Cayenne base Electric until about a month from now, but the 4S's acceleration seemed also much more lethargic than my CT4's acceleration -- again surprising me and making me wonder what the base Cayenne will be like. The Cayenne's weight isn't that much more than the Taycan (I think only about 500 lbs or so), but it feels much heavier to me, probably because of the higher center-of-gravity. Again, I expected that the Cayenne 4S would accelerate at least as well as my Taycan 4, but it does not. So the cockpit in the Cayenne is much better than the cockpits of both the Taycan and the Macan EV, and it's more spacious all around inside, but it also feels much larger when driving it. Put the Cayenne cockpit in the Taycan, and you've got a much better Taycan.
The Cayennes have NACS port on the driver side and a J1772 port on the passenger side, which is ok (though I wish there were instead a full NACS port with Telsa AC port on one side, and a full CCS port on the other side -- that would be great design, and I'd pay like $2k extra for that as an option). There just are too many CCS stations out there still in 2026 and not as many NACS stations outside of Tesla, as I've found on my regular cross-country roadtrips (had one in May to upper Great Lakes and another once coming up to the south Atlantic) -- and CCS charging plugs are going to be around for a VERY long time in a big way because there are so many CCS cars on the roads now (NACS in non-Teslas only became a thing in the past year, and those NACS cars are a large minority of all the non-Tesla BEVs on American roads today, and nobody wants to use an adapter if they don't have to). There's a box on the electronic sliding port doors to touch to get the charging-port doors to open; only one can be open at a time, and there's no way to close them manually (I guess that they close automatically after some set amount of time). But if you open one port door, then go to the other side and touch the box to open that door, it will pause a few seconds, close the opposite-site port door that was open and then open the latest port door that you chose to open -- so that's good. I still worry about electronic doors' software/hardware breaking and not being able to open a door when you need to.
In the rear of the Turbo Cayenne, there are lots of electronic buttons -- two for putting down the two sides of the rear seats electronically, and two for moving them back up electronically; they do move much more slowly than if you were to do so manually (not sure if manual movement is an option -- didn't check that but assume that it is from the side doors). The Turbo also had the electrochromic glass in the roof, and there are several virtual buttons in the infotainment screen to change the glass opacity as well as a single "button" up by the mirror (next to the buttons for cabin lighting, etc.) that you can use to toggle through the different roof-glass opacities. My complaint with all these automotive electrochromic glass designs is that they only go transparent or translucent, not opaque; I wish that they'd have an option to go opaque like the electrochromic glass in passenger windows of Boeing Dreamliner jets -- big mistake by the automakers. And there's no longer a moving inside mesh sun blocker in the Cayenne Electrics, so there's no way to shut out sunlight from the roof glass if you don't get the electrochromic glass (unless you buy some special-fit second-party glass blocker like "HeatShield", as I did with my Taycan to keep out unwanted heat/light in the summer).
Phone storage and placement of USB ports for them in the front storage area is excellent in the Cayenne (perhaps not as good as in the Macan EV from my experience, but the Taycan has literally nothing useful for phones). I would order any of these vehicles with a center-dash compass (which includes a digital clock). The clocks that Porsche has aren't that great (only a second hand, not hour and minute hands, despite having a 12-hour analogue appearance), and having a bare center dashboard doesn't look as good to me. My wife likes seeing a clock up on the dashboard at all times, and I agree with that. The passesnger screen in the Cayenne 4S is visible to the driver when the car is parked, but not while the car is in motion -- even with the front passenger seat occupied. I like being able to see the passenger screen when I'm driving my '21 Taycan CT4, because my wife will have the audio/music displayed there which I can easily see at a (safe) glance while I keep driving things like map/navigation on the center infotainment screen. But Porsche has apparently decided that they want to regulate what their high-paying drivers can and cannot see while driving.... sigh... (How many Taycan drivers with passenger screens have gotten into accidents because they looked over at the passenger screen while driving? I'd wager zero.)
The two Cayennes that I sat in both had < 50 miles on the odometer, and their equivalent ranges on a full charge were both around 250 miles, which was surprising to me. I know that you have to drive, charge and discharge, for a few hundred miles to get the computer predictions for range in good order. Joe told me that the cars arrive at the dealership off the ships with < 10% SoC, so they're charged to full at the dealership for the first time. From journalist YouTube videos, I've been surprised at the huge range of ranges: Kyle and Tom have shown basically 350 miles of range on a full charge (extropolated from both their test runs and just general driving showing the predicted range and SoC on the screens) on their Cayenne Electrics (both prototypes and now new sellable cars), whereas almost all the European journalists have shown Cayennes in the last couple of months to have only 220-270 miles of range, even with thousands of miles on the odometer. Kyle and Tom got 350 miles on two different Cayennes last October in California running 70 mph. So I don't understand why there's such a disparity between the Europeans and the Americans in Cayenne Electric range; it's a big deal if real -- doesn't make sense.
Joe told me that the dealership had no say in how the first "Introduction" Cayenne Electrics are spec'd, and they're pretty much spec'd to the hilt. The Turbo MSRP that I sat in costs $202k USD, and the 4S costs $160k; they aren't giving any discounts off MSRP at this dealership and have already sold one or two of the intro models. I don't like the rear light strip, which now has the PORSCHE lettering lit up in red when the lights are on; I don't know about others, but I am embarrassed to have this tacky "Mercedes"-like glowing lettering/badging on the car's exterior. This is new for 2026, as I understand it -- standard on Cayenne. It's also tacky on a new Taycan CT4 that I was considering a couple of months ago. Porsche should give us the option to have the PORSCHE lettering not lit up when the lights are on.
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