For more than twenty years, the Porsche Cayenne has been the SUV that saved the company and quietly earned a reputation among people who actually use their trucks hard. While the rest of the world argued about whether a Porsche should even be an SUV, a small group of owners were bolting on lift kits, bigger tires, and skid plates, then disappearing into the desert or the mountains. Those guys knew something the brochures never quite admitted: the Cayenne could hang off-road with the best of them.
Now Porsche is rolling out an all-electric Cayenne for the first time, and it tips the scales at about 5,830 pounds – heavier than any Cayenne that has come before. Most people would look at that number and figure the off-road party is over. Porsche’s engineers thought the same thing… until they took it to the dunes outside Dubai.
Image credit: Porsche
Michael Schaetzle, the vice president in charge of the entire Cayenne program, told reporters straight up: the electric version is better off-road than the gas model it will sit next to in the showroom.
“We are working on the car so that the off-road capabilities are as good as the combustion-engine Cayenne,” Schaetzle said. “We did our work in Weissach, and then we came to Dubai, and it was better than we believed.”
He went on, clearly still a little surprised himself: “It’s unbelievable. You have to switch on the sound mode because it’s very important you hear the slip. It’s so easy because you’ve got so much power. You’re going up the dune and you can modify the power perfectly. It’s much better than the ICE.”
That last line is the one that stops most guys in their tracks. An electric SUV – silent, heavy, and packed with batteries – just smoked its gas brother climbing a sand face. How?
Instant torque is part of it. Where a gas engine has to wind up and the turbos have to spool, the electric Cayenne delivers every bit of its power the moment you touch the pedal. In deep sand, that means you can feather the throttle with surgical precision, keeping momentum exactly where you want it instead of waiting for boost or listening to a torque converter flare.
Image credit: Porsche
The other half of the story is the hardware. Check the Offroad Package and Porsche raises the electric Cayenne to roughly 9.6 inches of ground clearance, bumps the approach angle to 25 degrees, fits special tires, reinforces the axles, and ties everything together with the latest Active Ride suspension that can level the body or even lift one wheel completely off the ground when you need it. All the tricks the gas Cayenne already had, just tuned for the new weight distribution and power delivery.
Porsche isn’t ignoring the jobs people actually use a big SUV for, either. The electric model still tows 7,700 pounds – the exact same rating the outgoing V8 versions carried. Hook up a boat or a trailer full of toys and yes, the range will drop. Dirk Britzen, head of Cayenne sales and marketing, says that’s no different from any gas or diesel truck: the heavier the load, the faster you drive, and the steeper the grade, the more energy you burn. It’s physics, not a conspiracy.
Image credit: Porsche
What Porsche has done is build a separate electric model line on a clean-sheet platform instead of just bolting batteries into the old body. That let the engineers move weight around, lower the center of gravity despite the extra pounds, and write software that turns those batteries from a handicap into an advantage when the pavement ends.
The guys who spent years lifting Cayennes and fitting 33-inch tires are already doing the math. An electric powertrain that doesn’t overheat on long climbs, no radiator to punch full of mud, regenerative braking on the way back down the mountain, and torque that arrives faster than any supercharged V8 ever could – suddenly the idea of an off-road electric Porsche doesn’t sound crazy. It sounds like the next logical step.
Twenty-three years after the original Cayenne kept Porsche alive by bringing in buyers who needed space for kids, dogs, and lumber, the company might have just done it again. Only this time the savior runs on electrons and, if the men who built it are right, climbs dunes better than anything with a tailpipe ever did.
Image credit: Porsche
For the first time in a long time, the future of off-roading might not sound like a V8 at all. And a whole lot of guys who swore they’d never give up internal combustion are starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe, they’ve been looking at this whole electric thing the wrong way.
