2025 Porsche Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid First Drive: Blurring the Plug-In Hybrid Line
Plug-in hybrids usually walk a fine a line between combustion and electric power. This super Panamera makes that line invisible.
What is the Porsche Panamera, anymore? Ostensibly, it’s a luxury sport sedan, but it’s also a plug-in hybrid, a supercar, and a track car. It seems like a ridiculous combination when you say it, but when you drive the new 2025 Porsche Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid, it somehow all makes sense.
0:00 / 0:00
Check the Stats
Seems hyperbolic, but it holds up. Let’s check the numbers: a claimed 2.8 seconds to 60 mph, which we have no reason to doubt. A top speed of 202 mph and a class-record 7:24.17-minute Nürburgring Nordschleife lap time round out the performance stats. This mega plug-in hybrid makes a combined 771 hp and 737 lb-ft of torque from its twin-turbo 4.0-liter V-8 and the 140-kW electric motor embedded in the eight-speed dual-clutch transmission. And of course, it does all this while offering the convenience and comfort of its four doors and seats, all of which are big enough for full-grown adults (if things can be a bit snuggly in the back).
A Personality for Every Possibility
Did we mention the 2025 Porsche Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid also has an all-electric mode called E-Power that can do 87 mph (on flat ground, if you’re real gentle with the accelerator) and can cover somewhere around 50 miles on a full charge? The average American’s commute is 40 miles roundtrip and rarely exceeds 87 mph (Los Angeles and Miami excepted). You don’t have to fire up the V-8 until you need it, and nobody hates saving gas, especially when they still have 771 hp available at moment’s notice.
Of course, this isn’t a Toyota Prius, it’s a performance hybrid. While not having to use gas in traffic and at lights certainly brings the average fuel economy up, it’s not all the electric motor is good for. Cruising in hybrid mode once you’ve reached the end of either the electric motor’s capability or the battery’s reserve, it takes on an additional duty starting the combustion engine completely seamlessly. The engine is so quiet at low rpm, you neither hear nor feel the handover.
You might feel the gear changes, though. This is, again, a performance hybrid, and its responses are tuned aggressively. It doesn’t take much accelerator pedal to get thrown back in your seat by even just the electric motor. If you’re gentle you’ll barely feel it change gears, but assertive driving will lessen its composure, and getting on and off the pedal quickly can occasionally trigger a stiff gear change as the computer tries to figure out what the hell you want, which is usually for someone in another car to make up their mind and go.
Tightly wound as the drivetrain might be, the ride isn’t. The 2025 Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid gets Porsche’s fancy new single-chamber air suspension and hydraulic shock absorbers that are capable of mighty feats of handling (see: Nürburgring lap time) but also shockingly good ride quality. L.A.’s cracked and potholed streets could only send vibrations through the floor at their worst. Occupants barely feel impacts and rarely get tossed around even a little. Such isolation would be less surprising on a different trim level, but on the sportiest, most hardcore model, it’s a revelation.
Finally, out of the city, it’s time for Sport Plus mode. Sure, you could start with Sport, but we usually skip right past it. Crank the knob, and the suspension drops, the shocks firm up, the engine growls to life, and the electric motor switches to pure performance duty. This is where things get really blurry.
Squeeze the right pedal, and the 2025 Porsche Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid surges ahead like a Lucid Air. Yes, the V-8 is doing most of the work now, but the torque fill and horsepower boost from the electric motor flatten the acceleration curve so the experience feels almost like an electric car with a well-integrated V-8 soundtrack. The big tell comes when the car surpasses 100 mph, where most EVs tend to fall off. The V-8, though, is on the cam and pulls even harder to redline. This extra surge of acceleration at high rpm reminds you there’s gasoline being burned here.
Push Me Around
If you’ve decided to play it safe with your $228,495 investment (before options), you’ve left traction and stability control fully on, in which case Porsche’s new Active Suspension may come into play. Those hydraulic shock absorbers react almost instantaneously to counter pitch, dive, and roll and keep the body flatter through acceleration, braking, and turning. It’s not something you really feel unless you arrive at a sharp corner very quickly and turn the wheel very quickly, at which point you can feel the side of the car opposite the direction of the corner pop up. In your everyday driving, an aggressive entry into a freeway cloverleaf might do it, but that’s about it.
Switch to PSM Sport, and that system switches off as the traction and stability control throttle back. If you’ve been driving aggressively with the system on, you’ll notice the difference as the car behaves a bit more the way you’d expect, in that it leans deftly into corners rather than trying to mitigate their effects.
Whichever you prefer has little bearing on just how blindingly fast the 2025 Porsche Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid is on a mountain road. A 911 feels smaller and nimbler, but anything short of a Turbo S will have trouble walking away from this Panamera. Remember, it has double the torque of a 911 GT3 and 50 percent more power. In fact, it has so much power you simply time-shift between corners, then carry big speed through them. The tires don’t make a peep at anything within the realm of sane speeds unless you try to overdrive the car coming out of a corner, though the permanent all-wheel drive, invisible rear steering, and brilliant torque vectoring do everything in their arsenal to put down all the power you request.
Don’t Hold Me Back
Even when you brake, it’s difficult to believe this car weighs 5,300 pounds as Porsche says. The massive carbon-ceramic brakes meld perfectly with the enhanced regenerative braking and easily slow the Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid over and over again. Because Porsche doesn’t believe in one-pedal driving or even aggressive regenerative braking, you don’t have to change your driving style at all. The car coasts when you’re off the accelerator and only slows when you hit the brakes, so you can lift and coast through corners without worrying about the regen over-slowing the car or upsetting the balance.
It never feels like a 2.7-ton car midcorner, either. Yeah, it’s a large vehicle and it takes up a lot of the lane, but it’s an absolute wizard at hiding its weight. No, it doesn’t feel light like a 911, but it doesn’t feel like you’re flinging a Cayenne around, either. It feels solid, not heavy. The rear steering makes it surprisingly nimble, and the steering is beautifully weighted, so it never feels like you’re manhandling the car.
Take Us Home
Once you’re done scaring the living daylights out of the whole family, you just twist the knob back the other way and it all returns to being a luxury sedan—quiet, comfortable, and as sedate as you choose to drive. Like nothing ever happened, just cruising on electrons (Sport and Sport Plus modes actively charge the battery while driving so the electric motor can provide full boost on demand).
If you’d like to experience this kind of cognitive dissonance for yourself, you can order your 2025 Porsche Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid now, but you won’t see it until early spring 2025. That gives you plenty of time to spend on the configurator to see if you can’t double that $228,495 starting price with options and customization. Yeah, supercar performance costs supercar money, but if you’re looking at Porsches, you already knew that.
Were you one of those kids who taught themselves to identify cars at night by their headlights and taillights? I was. I was also one of those kids with a huge box of Hot Wheels and impressive collection of home-made Lego hot rods. I asked my parents for a Power Wheels Porsche 911 for Christmas for years, though the best I got was a pedal-powered tractor. I drove the wheels off it. I used to tell my friends I’d own a “slug bug” one day. When I was 15, my dad told me he would get me a car on the condition that I had to maintain it. He came back with a rough-around-the-edges 1967 Volkswagen Beetle he’d picked up for something like $600. I drove the wheels off that thing, too, even though it was only slightly faster than the tractor. When I got tired of chasing electrical gremlins (none of which were related to my bitchin’ self-installed stereo, thank you very much), I thought I’d move on to something more sensible. I bought a 1986 Pontiac Fiero GT and got my first speeding ticket in that car during the test drive. Not my first-ever ticket, mind you. That came behind the wheel of a Geo Metro hatchback I delivered pizza in during high school. I never planned to have this job. I was actually an aerospace engineering major in college, but calculus and I had a bad breakup. Considering how much better my English grades were than my calculus grades, I decided to stick to my strengths and write instead. When I made the switch, people kept asking me what I wanted to do with my life. I told them I’d like to write for a car magazine someday, not expecting it to actually happen. I figured I’d be in newspapers, maybe a magazine if I was lucky. Then this happened, which was slightly awkward because I grew up reading Car & Driver, but convenient since I don’t live in Michigan. Now I just try to make it through the day without adding any more names to the list of people who want to kill me and take my job.
Read More
