Sensible Pan'

The most practical Panamera gets even more sensible with the addition of a plug-in hybrid powertrain.

- Daryl Lee

If I’m being completely honest, the Panamera 4 E-Hybrid Sport Turismo occupies a bit of an odd place in the line-up. To start with, it’s a station wagon (or if you want to get technical about it, a shooting brake), which already makes it a bit of an oddity in the vast Porsche range, where there are an innumerable number of variants and sub-variants.

Not for lack of trying, mind you. Porsche tried to make a shooting brake a production reality more than three decades ago, when it gifted a one-off car based on a 928 to Ferry Porsche for his 75th birthday in 1984.

Making it even odder is how this Panamera is a hybrid. Again, not very strange on the face of things, since Porsche has been doing hybrid Panameras for a while now, and there’s also the small matter of the 918 Spyder hypercar.

But why I say the Panamera 4 E-Hybrid Sport Turismo (phew, that was a mouthful) is an oddity is because there are not one, but two plug-in hybrids in the Panamera range. Well, four if you count the pair of non-wagon hybrid Panameras.

But anyway, where this particular Panamera sits is in the middle of the line-up, at some half the price of the S$800,000-odd Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid Sport Turismo. But where the Panamera hybrid twins differ is in their remit. Where the Turbo S model (well, actually this is also turbocharged; don’t ask, it’s complicated) is built to be a 680hp, supercar-baiting, ‘bahn-storming cruise missile, the non-Turbo variant is built for… frugality? I think?

It seems that way on the surface, at least. Its claimed consumption figure is 2.6 litres/100km, with a big part of that down to how it can run entirely on electric power for 51km at speeds of up to 140km/hr. Obviously, that number is hugely optimistic, and out in the real world, its electric-only range is more in the neighbourhood of 30km, which is still fairly decent.