2011 Porsche Cayenne Hybrid Review

The 2011 Porsche Cayenne Hybrid. Green with grins.

The very idea of a Porsche hybrid takes some big-time explaining for a lot of people. A $67,700 Porsche hybrid SUV even more so.

The Porsche Cayenne is the SUV in question, and to a lot of Porsche purists, it was the Porsche that wasn't supposed to be built anyway. It was counter to the marque's mission of building laser-focused sports cars with 2 doors and low centers of gravity.

But the Cayenne has been a success. Porsche builds a lot of them and has built market share squarely on its broad shoulders. And since powerful SUVs have taken the biggest hit when gas prices get squirrely, wouldn't they be the perfect place to employ a little hybrid technology?

The 2011 Porsche Cayenne Hybrid. A few extra MPG for a couple extra Gs.

Hybrid luxo-SUVs aren't new anyway...three years ago, when TireKicker was a toddler, we spent in a week in and then wrote about the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid...which, in 2008 was 5 grand more than this year's Porsche Cayenne S Hybrid.  The Porsche has the edge on performance (0-60 in 6.1 seconds), handling (elementary physics) and, as it turns out, gas mileage, though neither of them pump up the EPA estimates to Prius levels.

In fact, the Hybrid Cayenne S only gets about 2 miles more per gallon in the city and on the highway  (20/24) than the non-hybrid version. But Porsche only charges a couple of grand more to make the gas/electric leap.

The 2011 Porsche Cayenne Hybrid Interior. You could get used to this.

$67,700 might strike you as something of a bargain for the Cayenne S Hybrid...and you're right. For what you get, that's a fairly compelling base price. But with Porsche, the difference between base price and as-tested price often jumps by the price of a loaded Honda Fit once you get into the optional equipment. And that's what happened to our test vehicle. About $16,000 worth of options got poured onto and into the machine ($4520 of it for the Convenience Package alone), for an endgame (including destination charges of $84,950.

Yes, that's very different from $67,700, but it's not out of the territory for Porsche buyers...who, with the Porsche Cayenne S Hybrid, get arguably the best of all worlds: An SUV that saves a bit of gas and a bit of the planet because it's a hybrid, and is a Porsche.

Try as you might (and a lot of journalists have tried very hard the past few years to poke holes in the Cayenne), it's tough to find fault with the finished product. It works like an SUV, goes and handles like a Porsche (okay, the center of gravity does affect things...but there's no other SUV that can play in the twisties like this one) and the hybrid system is unobtrusive.  A dealer-accompanied half-hour test drive will have you wanting one. A week unsupervised (as we got) just makes it worse. If Porsche sent it back to us tomorrow, we'd be happy campers.

Read more »

EV Owners in California to Feel the Shock of Higher Electricity Rates

Woe betide the electric car. Outpaced by their petrol-powered cousins in the 1900s, saddled with heavy and potentially dangerous batteries in the 1970s and crushed in the name of the Almighty Dollar in the 1990s, it’s been a rough road from there to here.

And now, on the dawn of a new age where electric cars seem poised to take their rightful place alongside gasoline cars, the electricity companies are about to throw a wrench into the works. If you live in California and intend to buy a plug-in hybrid Toyota Prius or Chevrolet Volt or an all-electric Nissan Leaf, you could be in for a...shock.

If the energy giants have their way, the Chevy Cobalt, which would have to rate on my list as one of the least desirable cars built by GM, is more economical to own or operate than any of the above. The reason?

Essentially, The California government has approved its energy providers to impose higher rates on customers who exceed, “typical household levels” of energy use all in the name of conservation. So if, for example, you spend eight hours a night recharging your electric car, you’ll find yourself classed as one of these excess customers.

Wham, bam, the electricity companies charge you more than Mr. Joe Public next door who drives a Toyota Sienna and still has to pay for the good oil. And contrary to what you may of heard, it doesn’t matter if you recharge your car at night when the rates are lower; you’re still gonna take a hit to your hip pocket.

And it’s not like the California legislature is rushing to correct this oversight.

Wally Tyner, the James and Lois Ackerman Professor of Agricultural Economics, said that to make the Volt more economical than the Prius or the Cobalt, oil prices would have rise to between $171 and $254 per barrel, depending on which electricity pricing system is being used. Californians for example, pay an average of 14.42 cents per kilowatt hour, which is about 35 percent higher than the national average.

"People who view the Volt as green will pay $10,000 more over the lifetime of the car because it's green," Tyner said. "Most consumers will look at the numbers and won't pay that.

So until you’ve taken a pen and paper and worked out the real cost of owning an EV in California, maybe keep that Geo Metro for a while longer.

Read more »