Life is pretty good in a Porsche Panamera. It’s an unabashed luxury sedan, but also a driver’s car—more of a modern grand tourer than anything else. It exists somewhere on the spectrum between the BMW 8 Series and the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, and you won’t find anything else quite like its mix of talents.
The Panamera is new for 2024, but not all-new, as it were. This is a heavy revision of the previous Panamera with ample tweaks to bridge the divide between sport and luxury. The highlight of these efforts is Porsche Active Ride, an active-suspension system that is truly mind-blowing, but we’ll get back to that a little later. On the mountain roads outside Seville, Spain, we drove the base Panamera, then tested the new Turbo E-Hybrid—with its active suspension—at the Circuito Monteblanco.
Porsche builds seemingly endless variants of its cars, luring buyers up the ladder with models incrementally more powerful and luxurious than the slightly less-expensive model below. But in Porsche’s world, base models should not be overlooked. They offer the essence of the top-spec models for less money. I’ll stop short of saying they’re a great value, because the US-spec equivalent to this base Panamera costs $133,310 as optioned, and for that you just get a twin-turbo 2.9-liter V-6 with 348 horsepower and 361 pound-feet of torque.
It’s still a lot of car. Ultimately, this new(ish) Panamera doesn’t feel like a radical departure from the last one, but that’s no bad thing. Standard for the third generation is a suspension system consisting of two-chamber air springs and adaptive dampers with independent valves for compression and rebound adjustments. Porsche claims a huge improvement in both ride quality and handling.
