Fast hybrids make so much sense. All the performance, less of the exorbitant fuel usage and the ability to float about in smug, eco-friendly silence on your city commute before going banzai on your favourite B-road. Sounds perfect. And yet it isn’t. Not yet.

No manufacturer seems to have quite managed the perfect execution of the performance hybrid (south of the hypercar scene, which is something rather more than ‘just’ performance hybrids). Maybe a BMW i8, but even that’s questionable.

Even Porsche hasn’t nailed the brake feel, the weight management, the way the electric and combustion engines work together or alone… It’s been good, but never as good or better to drive than a combustion-engined alternative. 

But now there’s this. The Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid – a sleek slab of prime, luxury four-door real estate, brimming with twin-turbo V8 naughtiness and digitally enhanced with 30 miles of pure-electric power. Or, with the electric and V8 motors working together, you have 671bhp and the sort of torque levels normally only seen in astrophysics being shuffled about by the clever four-wheel-drive system.

Mind you, it needs the seriously significant performance levels to justify the seriously significant cost of £137,140. Ouch.

First Impressions

The lurid green brake calipers are the most overt design cue that differentiate this range-topping Panamera. Apart from that, it looks much the same as the rest of the Panamera range, which is to say low, squat and wide, with a v...