Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder, which might have been writ large in Porsche HQ when it first launched the Cayenne to an incredulous world in 2002.
It was Porsche's first SUV and naturally, being a Porsche, it was expensive, it was ritzy, it was glitzy, it had pretty powerful engines and it was less than fuel efficient. What it wasn't was low and sporty and particularly good-looking and, as a result, it attracted much opprobrium from both the press and Porsche aficionados for its funny face and slab-sided SUV-ness.
No matter the public liked it, the gamble paid off and this and successive generations of Cayenne have gone on to shake their money maker most handsomely for Porsche, such that no respectable middle-class driveway would now be seen without one.
This story is from the February 01, 2023 edition of Autocar UK.
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This story is from the February 01, 2023 edition of Autocar UK.
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