All Couped Up

The latest addition to the Porsche SUV family, the Cayenne Coupe, sees an increase in handling ability at the expense of practicality.

- Daryl Lee

The porsche cayenne coupe is one of those cars that, had it been released in the early 2000s when the original Cayenne made its debut, wouldn’t have made much sense. The right product in the right place at the right time is pretty much the watchword of the modern automotive industry, after all.

The world at that time hadn’t yet developed an appetite for the bizarre chimeras that dominate the automotive landscape today: the full-sized SUV-coupe, the four-door coupe and of course, the mid-sized crossover.

Heck, even the very notion of a pure-blooded sports car manufacturer making an SUV was a new one at the time. Of course, there’s an equally compelling argument in, ‘if you build it, they will come’.

These days, of course, the landscape is rather different. Every manufacturer has at least one SUV-coupe hybrid in its line-up and SUVs now constitute the bulk of sales – sports car makers such as Porsche included.

In fact, SUVs accounted for some 68 per cent of the 280,800 Porsches sold in 2019. As for its ‘traditional’ products – that is to say sports cars in the form of the 918 and 718 Boxster/Cayman – those accounted for around 20 per cent. Combined.