Stuttgart’s Finest
In an ideal world, the Porsche Macan would have finished in first place. It deserves to frankly. In an ideal world, however, we would all have one crore to spend on a daily driver!
The Macan S Diesel really does deserve to be number one. It’s one of the very few cars that scored full points in three different categories – Quality, Refinement, and Drivetrain.
The quality is second to none. The whole car just feels screwed together with a precision that’s exclusive to Stuttgart’s finest. It simply feels overbuilt, like every Porsche before it. The interior is nothing short of impeccable. The drivetrain, as well, is near perfect for everyday use. The 3.0-litre diesel engine, which produces 241bhp, is all the power that you’ll ever need.
Even on the track, the Macan surges forward – a feeling amplified by the lightning quick gear changes from the seven-speed dual-clutch transmission. On the track, you do begin to feel the weight of the machine – as you get a little bit of understeer initially, until the torque vectoring takes over and miraculously pulls you through the corner.
Really, if you think about it, the Macan is the perfect sports car for India. It really does feel more like a sports car rather than an SUV – that’s what we said when we first drove it in the UAE in the middle of this year, and this test reinforced that sense. Clearly, this is not a track tool – but it wasn’t built to be one. It was built to offer the Porsche driving experience to a wider audience – a driving experience closer to a sports car than the Cayenne could ever dream to be. The Cayenne GTS is perhaps more extreme, but even that feels a bit big and heavy compared to this.
The trade-off with the Macan is a little less space, but that’s a trade-off that I’d be willing to make everyday of the week. The trouble with the Macan is the price! At one crore, it’s more expensive than the Cayenne. Sure, it’s fully loaded, it’s newer, it looks and drives better – but the price is something that we just can’t get our heads around. The key, I suppose, is the fact that production is limited and the Macan has waiting lists a mile long across the globe. And so, India gets a very limited supply – which means that it’ll be very exclusive indeed.
Take price and availability out of the equation, however, and what you’re left with is the perfect car for our roads. It’s the perfect size, the ride height is such that you don’t have to cringe every ten metres, the refinement levels are incredible, and it’s got a lot of get up and go when you demand it. The important thing, though, is that it has the delicacy and that special something in its DNA that it shares with its sports car siblings.
So, in an ideal world, we’d all be driving Macans rather than simply living in them. But this isn’t an ideal world, and so this Porsche SUV simply can’t go any further up the charts in this instance.
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