How Good Is A Porsche Cayenne As An Off-Road Vehicle?

Earlier this week, I was invited by Porsche to drive a few of its cars at the company’s experience centre in Silverstone. Porsche 911 Turbos, Cayman and Boxster GTS models, Panameras and new Macans were all on offer for a thorough track session, but my gaze was aimed at something a little slower-paced. After all, I’ve experienced brutal launch control getaways in most of these cars already.

What I was curious to know, then, was just how well a Cayenne copes as an off-road vehicle. To find out, I headed straight to the sports car maker’s purpose-built off-road section and jumped inside a Diesel version of the car that featured Porsche Torque Vectoring Plus which controls the rear diff. Before we headed out, the Cayenne’s air suspension was raised by six inches to increase the approach/departure angles and potential wading depth.

Faced with a 1:1 incline and sitting on a set of all-season tyres, the Cayenne pulled itself up with a small scrabble of a wheel, but little in the way of drama; the brief 45-degree hill-hold demo highlights the Cayenne’s versatility. As you can see from the video above, the same can be said for the way in which the Cayenne rolled itself down the other side thanks to the car’s hill descent control that works between two and 19mph.

In the trickier sections of the course where you can see the Cayenne’s wheel articulation, the way in which the SUV crawled its way across like a pendulum was genuinely impressive and a lot of fun to experience from inside the cabin.

To answer my original question - how good is a Porsche Cayenne as an off-road vehicle? - the answer is very. The Cayenne has surprisingly good ground clearance when the suspension’s jacked up to its maximum (a full 268mm vs a Range Rover’s 300mm figure), and the driver aids make this an extremely capable machine when the going gets rough.

For a car that spends most (if not all) of its time on tarmaced roads, and for a car of which 580,000 examples have been sold since its launch in 2002, the Cayenne has shown me that it’s a lot more than just a Chelsea tractor. If only its owners were also aware of this secret…