I'm waiting a Panamera S E Hybrid, and as part of my therapy for the waiting stress I've been following news about the car. So it was rather surprising to see two diametrically opposed reviews appear in the UK Telegraph in a couple of days.

First, there's the "motoring" section review by Andrew English that pans it. Distinctly unjustly, IMHO. He faults it for "bad braking," which was not my experience in a test drive, or any other reviewer's, being too heavy, not delivering the unrealistic MPG of the NEDC test, and costing too much money.

What really gets me is the second to last line, where arbitrarily decides that owners will buy a plug-in hybrid and then not plug it in, and faults it for that. It's an obviously stupid statement, since if you aren't fascinated by the idea of driving around on electrical power, you can by an S and get better overall performance for less money. That for me was the clearest signal that he never planned on giving the car a fair review in the first place. Some people just don't like hybrids.

OK, some people are like that. What's interesting is that the same paper published a wildly positive review by Michael Harvey 6 days later. It's not quite a puff piece, since he addresses some of my concerns about the car ("how much of a Porsche is it?"), but it's still about as far removed from the first article as I can imagine.