cometguy

I just returned home from a driving trip in my 2018 Sport Turismo E-Hybrid (Pan4) from Massachusetts to Utah and Wyoming and back, across the upper midwest.
I'm attaching some photos taken out west, showing my car in the fabulous scenery there.

I have done a lot of cross-country non-Porsche driving in my lifetime (in a V8 Dodge Charger, various family station wagons, and SUVs), but this is the best long-distance touring vehicle I have ever driven, by far.
I averaged about 30 mpg for the entire trip in mostly "Hybrid Auto" mode. I have lower back problems, and I bought a special posture-pedic small pillow in case I developed back problems, but to my happy surprise, the 14-way seats with lumbar support were fine for the entire trip, and I never got that emergency pillow out. The car garnered attention everywhere I went (not what I really wanted out in the remote west, land of pickup trucks), and several people expressed amazement at seeing a Porsche station wagon; but I didn't have any real problems, save for a single park-ranger stop for speeding in Wyoming (when I thought the speed limit was 10 mph higher than it was -- I found that the speed-limit-notification digital sign on the left side of the dash instrument panel is very OFTEN wrong). I used adaptive cruise control for perhaps 98 percent of my miles driven on the highway, and it's a life-saver -- really makes me feel much more refreshed at the end of a 10-hour day driving; it was pretty darn good, though it would sometimes annoyingly pick up a car in an adjacent lane on the interstate that moved a little too close to the line dividing the two lanes (not a problem with me as an alert driver, but it would slow down my car annoyingly much/fast at times). I did have one case on the trip when the ACC went out, and an error message came on (to left of the tachometer) saying that ACC could not be used because the sensors were dirty -- so I stopped at the next highway exit and cleaned both radar ports in the front of the car, and the ACC was back instantly when I started out again. The maps worked wonderfully; there was one case on the 2.5-week trip in which the marker denoting the car seemed to be off by roughly half a mile off the road and in a field, but that lasted only a few minutes. I did get frustrated at times with the intermittent wipers, in that I couldn't get them to always wipe a significant amount of rain away (and had to resort to the slow speed of non-intermittent wipers). I also have been somewhat annoyed at the acceleration at times when putting the pedal to the floor -- to pass, or to accelerate when getting on an interstate expressway, for example; the car has shown horsepower but unevenly, and a couple of times the RPMs have gotten "stuck" around 5000 (I'll have service look at it the next time I bring it in).

road from Park City to Big Cottonwood Canyon, Utah


I have gotten to use the night-vision infrared camera quite a bit now, and I really think it's a huge mistake to have it mounted at the bottom side of the bumper at center-front; it should be mounted up by the rear-view mirror (top of front windshield) and have a wider field-of-view, as you cannot see anything on the sides of the car about 5-10 feet in front of the car -- where pedestrians and animals often lurk. As I've noted previously at Rennlist, I also dislike having the infrared camera view to the right of the tachometer; at night, when you need it, you don't need the tachometer as much, and it would be nice to have the infrared view front-and-center -- but I know it's a problem with an analog tachometer.

I was in some driving rainstorms, and the car felt really planted, even when there was standing water on the highway -- but I felt uneasy about drivers around me. I continue to dislike the chrome and glassy panel surrounding the gear shifter, which I've stated elsewhere should be matte black as an option, because sunlight gleaning off them daily are a real annoyance. I personally dislike chrome in any form, and would be happy with zero chrome in my car (inside or out).

I had to get an oil change at Minneapolis Porsche when I was 300 miles shy of the 10k odometer mark; a really high-class dealership! I'm now at about 12.4k miles on the odometer, and the oil level has remained nearly full throughout.


Big Cottonwood Canyon, Utah

Entering southwestern South Dakota from Wyoming

north-central Wyoming

Badlands National Park, South Dakota

Badlands, SD

Badlands, SD

Badlands, SD

Badlands, SD

DogWood

Looks like you had a great drive :-)

cometguy

Yep, and a lot of unpaved roads, also... The car needed a huge bath when I got home. But I bought this car for two reasons: (1) roundtrip daily drives to work on electric-only; and (2) long-distance cross-country trips. So far, I'm very impressed on both counts. (And regarding the acceleration problem that I noted, it only happened occasionally; generally when I accelerated, it was smooth and not getting stuck.)

dudecs

Wonderful trip! Yes, the Panamera is superb for cross-country road trip. That is the primary reason for our purchase, including the luxury, comfort and performance. We've done a several trips now and especially love driving through all the mountain roads and national parks.

pokingaround

Cool post. Cool trip. Cool car!

c4racer

These cars do soak up miles like nothing else !
Thanks for sharing !!

rol607

skiracer

Great car, great roads and great pics!

lbcgolf

Thanks for sharing!

SaratogaLefty

Great post and nice photos. Were you able to talk your way out of the ticket? When I need to pass quickly I like to use the "go" button on the Sport Chrono dial. Response is immediate and very aggressive. So far I haven't experienced any of the acceleration issues you mentioned and absolutely no turbo lag whatsoever when I punch it .

cometguy

No... I drove slowly all through Yellowstone everywhere -- which you pretty much *want* to do because of all there is to see. But in this case, a couple of cars had stopped in the road in our direction of traffic to look at "another buffalo", just before a curve; nobody was coming, so I drove around them, but just as I was passing them, another car came around the curve, so I gunned it to get back into my lane quickly -- and, of course, a ranger was sitting just around the corner with her radar gun on (wouldn't you know it -- the only ranger we saw for days inside the Park that was looking for speeders). I think she saw the Porsche and figured I was a habitual speedster in the park -- which was absolutely not true. The speed limit in the Park is 45 mph unless noted otherwise; I had speeded up to the NASCAR level of 53 mph when I was radared, but the ranger said the speed limit had lowered to 35 mph in that area, so I was caught going 18 mph over. Total bummer. (So if people hear that I got a speeding ticket in my Panamera without additional info, they'll assume I was doing 95 mph in a 70 mph zone, or something like that... nope...)

No, I don't get turbo lag either when flooring it -- probably due to the electric motor. My main problem has been the engine sticking at high RPMs occasionally, even when taking my foot off the pedal totally. Maybe a software glitch that needs to be checked.

K777

Wow.

(kind of sums it up)

Steve48

cpbmd

cometguy

Thanks!
A few more comments about the trip that come to mind. First, that warning about the ACC not working due to dirty sensors appeared in the panel to the right of the tach, not the left.
Regarding gasoline: I found that (USA) octane-rating 93 gas largely disappears at gas stations west of the Mississippi, so I had to use only octane 91 west of Iowa and until I got back to Minnesota.
I understand that at high altitude above sea level (not sure *what* altitude, exactly, but I'm assuming above about 5000 feet elevation), octane 91 is plenty fine for our Porsches. I only spent a day or so at lower altitudes in "octane 91" country (South Dakota, around 2000-3000 feet above sea level).

I would sometimes run the engine on long interstate drives for a half hour or so on E-Charge, to get the battery charged up for driving in electric-only around towns (and animals in national parks), etc. That would generally mean about 22 mpg during that period of extra-gas usage. But I found that the best way to conserve fuel was to keep the car on ACC and Hybrid Auto, which generally kept the battery well charged (going down only slowly over a couple of hours; the car computer evidently keeps track and leaves a fair amount of electric-motor battery charge from getting too low, at least in my car) -- and this lead to close to 30 mpg for my driving overall. I did not plug in once on the trip, leaving my charge cables at home -- nor would I have really had the time to look for, and wait for, charging while on the trip. I found that, when in Hybrid Auto, when I needed to accelerate quickly, all the power was right there, so I never used Sport or Sport Plus on the trip, at all. I am wondering now, however, if being in Hybrid Auto might have had something to do with my engine sticking at high RPMs occasionally; I'll have to experiment some when accelerating in Sport and Sport Plus modes, and with the "hyper" acceleration button.

The three-month SiriusXM free subscription expired on my trip, and I just let it go because I wasn't finding it that great. We used songs in my Jukebox and on my son's iPhone piped into the car's audio system, so no need for radio on this trip. It also appears that, with the expiration of that, I lost the traffic-flow coloring on my map screen, but I always thought that was vastly inferior to the traffic-flow colors on Google Maps anyway and wasn't using it; in the Panamera, the colors only would show for major multi-lane roads, and it seemed to lag significantly behind Google Maps in update time, making them largely useless. So I just continued to depend on my iPhone's Google Maps. The car's map system was great, even in areas with no phone reception, due evidently to the satellite reception that the car has for this purpose beyond SiriusXM subscription.

Other than the little hiccups with the car's engine sticking briefly at high RPMs upon rapid acceleration occasionally, and the intermittent wipers not detecting rain on the windshield very well, the car behaved really flawlessly and wonderfully throughout the trip. I'm so thankful that I haven't had some of the problems that other users on this forum have described about their 2018 Panameras.