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Video: 2017 Porsche Panamera Review: First Impressions

02:03 min
By Cars.com Editors
November 17, 2016

About the video

Porsche redesigned its Panamera for 2017 and the result is a toned-down version of the luxury hatchback. A sleeker roofline and more streamlined-looking face give it a cleaner look overall. We checked it out at the 2016 Los Angeles Auto Show.

Transcript

(car starts) We are inside the redesigned Porsche Panamera, Porsche's flagship sedan, actually, technically a hatchback. And why are we inside the car? You might ask. Because this is really what you want to pay the most attention to.
This is the center stack of the car. Still like the old Panamera, just kind of blends down into the center console itself, but everything now, instead of having a lot of buttons is capacitive touch. I got to say, I'm philosophically opposed to capacitive touch buttons because they're just harder to reach and find, especially when you're in a environment of shifting momentum, like a car. But Porsche does an interesting job here. Everything has sort of a detent to it. So basically when you press down on something, you actually press down, and it clicks up here on these buttons. They don't exactly click, but they still make that noise. And so there's good feedback right here, and you get important, actual physical controls for things like your temperature and your volume knob right here. Now check this out. These are the two center air vents. They're actually controlled on this screen right here. And as you want to move the air events to actually change the direction of air flow. The vents themselves motor left, right, up or down, kind of a cool feature there. And it all repeats itself from the backseat. Now we're in the backseat. That up there is a 12.3 inch screen. There's a smaller screen back here for rear passengers available in the Panamera. You get the same cool controls that really are just going to provide more entertainment than any rear entertainment system could for your kids. They're just going to be playing around with this all day. There's a few more controls down here, and they're all physical, actually. Not really sure why Porsche didn't make these controls the same ones up there, but really cool overall still. After all that, you might not care that much about the exterior of the new Panamera, but there's some important changes here as well. Most notably with this redesign, it loses some of its sort of whale tail, that characterize the old model. The rear actually is about an inch lower the roof line here over the rear axle. You come around the back, you get sort of very iconic to Porsche. Now, taillights a shared with the Macan, the 911, all of this very cool. It's going to come with turbo-charged V6 or V8 engines on sale in January, 2017. So stay tuned for more.

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