Porsche Cayenne

 It is really fast though. Plus it sounds great and has a bunch of carbon fibre bits and snazzy gold wheels, and it serves as a real-world example of what engineers can do with a two-tonne SUV, when armed with decades of experience and a blank cheque.

But it isn’t sensible.

If you’re wanting an everyday Cayenne , I’d suggest saving a hefty $134,100 from the Turbo GT’s current $336,100 (before options and on-roads) sticker and grabbing a Cayenne GT Coupe  ($202,000).

It’s not as fast, but it will be a lot easier to live with, and for a cheeky $56,070 extra, you can option it up so that it has all the nifty tech goodies and looks the same when parked outside the Botanical on a Sunday morning.

And while this may signify the end of the review if you’re looking for the ‘smart’ Cayenne purchase, I’d wager most of you aren’t and so we forge on for the good of the community and take a look at the fastest SUV that Porsche has ever devised.

As noted, the Turbo GT is priced from $336,100 (until it jumps $16,600 to $352,700 when the clock strikes FY23), before options and on-road costs.

Being a Porsche , there will always be a few options, with our Artic Grey example popping an additional $30,640 on the invoice. If you’re feeling box-ticky, you can always push this higher through some extreme personalisation, including my favourite, the $3470 choice of having the air-vent slats trimmed in leather.

The Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT is available exclusively in the Coupe body style and is positioned $36,800 above the Cayenne Turbo S e-Hybrid Coupe or $73,900 over the ‘regular’ Cayenne Turbo Coupe ($262,200).

For that spend though, you get the most technically capable lump of four-seat family Porsche ever to roll out of Zuffenhausen.

The gang is all here. Retuned engine, revamped turbos and induction system, revised suspension damping so it is lower, stiffer and more nimble, not to mention a full scrabble board of Porsche acronyms including torque vectoring, chassis control and even four-wheel steering.

It’s a record-setter too. The Turbo GT is the fastest SUV to ever lap the Nürburgring, with a 7m 38.9sec time recorded for a full lap, and 7m 33.9sec bridge-to-gantry.

The Porsche Cayenne is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, which is an impressive milestone, but also means we’ve had a lot of subjective discussions about the Cayenne’s design for two-whole decades now.

The big SUV has never been a universal style favourite, but we should all agree that it has improved over each subsequent facelift and generation change.

The current third-generation car (classified as 9Y0 for the wagon and 9Y3 for the coupe) is the most handsome it has been, but there are still some sticking points.

From front-on, the Cayenne Turbo GT’s blacked-out grille assembly gives an impression somewhere between 'Three-Ball Charlie' from the Rolling Stones Exile On Main Street album cover and an athlete sporting a mouthguard and goofy grin.

As wide as the car, and in stark contrast to all but black paint, it’s clearly there to let the hungry Cayenne breathe better, but it’s not helping the Cayenne’s design defence.

Giant 22-inch wheels, which are finished in ‘Satin Neodyme’ rather than ‘gold’, again make the Turbo GT flex a little harder than most. The black, rather than body colour, wheel arches add the right amount of contrast to the side of the car and make the wheels seem well proportioned, which isn’t easy at that diameter.

Throw in a carbon-fibre roof and high-mount rear spoiler with aerodynamic ears, and we’re all but spent on transforming the sleek Cayenne coupe into a GT racer until you get to the back of the car that is.

In my opinion, the rear quarter view of the Porsche Cayenne, with that full-width LED light strip, is its best angle. I think the coupe-style does the big Porsche big favours and it works much better than BMW’s X6 and X4 do.

That said, the large rear diffuser and twin, titanium, central exhaust tips remove any hint of subtlety that you could possibly try to have with the Turbo GT.

It’s a premium family wagon wearing a baseball cap backwards, and I feel this is as far as you could push the Cayenne’s styling without it becoming a parody of itself.

Porsche knows how to put something together with a sense of timeless quality at every touchpoint.

The Turbo GT’s interior is lined with Alcantara as far as the eye can see, and it blends well with the modern switchgear layout and iconic Cayenne elements like the grab handles along the transmission tunnel.

Firm and supportive, the sports seats are excellent and include a combination of leather and Alcantara fabric. They are naturally heated, but ventilation is an option. The Turbo GT motif embroidered into the headrest is all part of the admission price.

You can of course make personal changes here too, like custom crests and coloured seat belts, but the standard configuration we have on our car is as good as anything, so maybe tread lightly at this point of your building journey.

There are carbon-fibre and other gloss trim elements around the cabin, but the haptic centre console is worth calling out in terms of both functionality and implementation.

A glossy-black panel is backlit by the buttons to control heating and cooling, but in the right light, you can clearly see that this is a generic panel for all Cayenne models and there are clearly features available on other models which aren’t implemented on yours.

Think of it as a modern version of the button blanking plate, and while it doesn’t feel like you’ve been cheated and are missing out, it does feel like you can tap these to activate seat ventilation or other functions.

Plus, the haptic panel never feels as well made as a proper button as the whole area tends to flex as you tap it. This isn’t limited to the Porsche, but may be an area where we see some improvement in coming years, particularly at this high end of the market.

Set up as a four-seater, the rear cabin is roomy even with the sloping roofline, with the central rear position replaced by a storage tray and handy armrest.

With a carbon-fibre roof to save weight, there’s no panoramic glass panel above you, which does make the interior ambience a little more dark and moody, but also helps with sound insulation.

Cargo volume is a very usable 549L which expands to 1464L if you need to fold the rear seats.

If there is an area where Porsche’s commitment to capability extends over usability, it’s the PCM (Porsche Communication Management) infotainment system.

In terms of capability, it has and does everything. The 12.3-inch touch screen offers DAB radio, which in a first for me, even shows the album cover art for songs playing on the radio, there is support for wireless Apple CarPlay, and remote telemetry connection through the Porsche Connect app.

It all looks very smart, but that user interface really isn’t very friendly.

It’s hard to see where you are in terms of menu levels, and I find you just go all the way back to ‘home’ to start again or find something else. Some of the buttons are quite small and tricky to tap on the move, plus there was no wireless charger in our car which is just a bit cheeky at this price point.

Porsche regularly updates the PCM software (which can be done over the air), which is great, but the user interface and general usability could take some lessons from Mercedes-Benz and BMW.

The current-generation Porsche Cayenne received a five star rating when tested by EuroNCAP in 2017. There is no crash-test data for the Cayenne (or any Porsche for that matter) from ANCAP.

The Cayenne Turbo GT includes the full range of driver assistance technology that Porsche has in the kitbag, and it all worked very well on our test, including the adaptive LED headlamps and lane keeping aids.

There are ten airbags (front, knee, full-length head, side for front and side for rear) as well as a pair of IOSFIX child seat mounting points.