PARIS MOTOR SHOW: Porsche Panamera Sport Turismo

Typical. You can’t find a shooting brake for 30 years and then you stumble on two in a matter of weeks.

No sooner had Mercedes-Benz revealed its CLS Shooting Brake when cross-town rival Porsche came along to steal its thunder.

The Panamera Sport Turismo concept car is a combination of future Porsche design and next-generation Porsche hybrid power.

Long pilloried for its ungainly, too-contrived coupe-esque tail, the Panamera has had its back-end completely redesigned to deliver something partway between a coupe and a traditional station wagon.

While officially dubbed the Sport Turismo, the car has become affectionately known as the “Shooting Brake” internally at Porsche, with the name scrubbed at the last minute in deference to Mercedes-Benz’s offering.

With short overhangs and a large bootlid, the Panamera Sport Turismo is a fraction shorter than the Shooting Brake, with a 4950mm overall length, is 10mm shy of two metres wide but with a 1401mm roofline to make it more like a sportscar in its overall height.

It delivers a new concept in lighting at Porsche, no longer trapped in the origins of the 911, and dubbed “C-Blades” by the design team, even though each light looks more like a pair of horseshoes facing forward. These lights incorporate all the indicators as well as LED headlights and sit inside the air intakes.

Tipping the design language of the next Panamera, it also boasts a clean skin, utterly devoid of appendages like side mirrors. These are replaced by a set of rear-facing cameras built into the side air outlets coming from the engine bay and fed into screens in the cabin.

The back-end of the car also uses LED lights, with the word “Porsche” formed up in 3D in the tail-light panel across the width of the car.

The culture shock continues inside the cabin, where traditional Porsche round dials have been supplanted by a single TFT screen delivers all of the driving information. Pioneered for production by sister company, Lamborghini, with its low-volume Reventon, the TFT screen replaces the speedo, tacho, oil pressure monitor, fuel tank and even the temperature gauge.

It also doubles as the navigation system’s display and, on either side of the main display, the Panamera Sport Turismo carries smaller displays to show the footage from the side-rear view cameras.

While the look will be pushed as the biggest news for the Panamera’s future, the real story lies beneath.

Even with Porsche now fully in the VW Group fold, the next generation of the Panamera will retain its unique, home-grown and -developed platform instead of moving across to the spaceframe aluminium layout it will share with Audi’s A8 and A7.

Essentially, it will be mildly modified under the skin in a clear declaration that it considers its current architecture to be more than the equal of everything else in the VW Group.

Porsche has also used the Panamera Sport Turismo to shrink-wrap its 918 hybrid technology into a more user-friendly package.

The Panamera Sport Turismo is a step towards a plug-in hybrid mass-production Porsche, delivering 306kW of power from both a supercharged V6 petrol engine and an electric motor.

Both motors are mounted up front, with the Audi-sourced petrol V6 providing 245kW of power and the latest generation electric motor delivering 70kW of power – about twice as much as Porsche’s current production hybrid system.

It will run a new Lithium-Ion battery pack that is multiples more powerful than the nickel-metal-hydride battery in the current hybrid, though it’s about the same external size.

The battery can store 9.4kW/h of energy that can be charged either by recuperation or through an AC charger, which will be enough, Porsche claims, to eke out 30km of pure electric driving before waking up the petrol engine. It can also be driven as a pure electric car at up to 130km/h.

The result is a concept car that can hit 100km/h in less than six seconds while still using less than 3.5L/100km in the NEDC combined driving test and delivering emissions of 82g/km of CO2.

One big shock is that the Panamera Sport Turismo defaults automatically to electric drive, even if the driver can flick the petrol engine into play at the touch of a button.

Even when it’s driving in hybrid mode, the driver can flick a steering wheel-mounted button to ramp up the amount of recharge being pumped into the battery, for example on long downhill runs or decelerating into stop signs and traffic lights.

Porsche says the new battery pack can be fully recharged in two and a half hours, though that depends on the quality of the power supply and will also depend on the driver using the Porsche-supplied plug-in wall adapter.

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