Ok guys, I have negotiated a deal on a new 2014 S Hybrid. I need to know the good bad and the ugly. I drive a lot of highway miles and I Thought this might be good for me and my fuel consumption. Let me hear your thoughts and the dos and dont's. If it doesn't have some get up and go to it then I am going with a regular S and to heck with gas mileage

Thanks guys

 

I was after a Hybrid...until I drove one. Didn't like the handling, driving feel. Wound up configuring a 4S and ordering. Should be here in April.

Be sure to test drive and compare to non Hybrid Panamera models before buying.

 

I have a cayenne ehybrid (and love it do far), however if you are doing mostly long highway runs, the benefit of the hybrid is somewhat lost. On a cayenne that is where a diesel would excel on a panamera I would lean towards the S.

If you do a lot of city, stop and go driving, or runs under 100 miles RT then the eHybrid is great. On my cayenne I average around 30-32 mpg on those type of runs. I get up to 50 mpg on a 30 mile RT. When I did a 350 mile weekend drive I only got about 24mpg (didn't plug in anywhere). I really like the quiet / smooth feeling in ePower (battery) mode. But love being able to push the sport button for 400+hp on tap.

 

You'd think that, but that's not my experience with my Panamera S e Hybrid. I've done a couple of long trips, and I got 35 MPG at 60 MPH, and 33 at 70 MPH. That's gasoline MPG, with the battery either at 20% or reserved for city driving.

I'm not sure why you only experienced 24 MPG. It's not just that it was a Cayenne rather than a Panamera, I'm sure.

What's your actual highway MPG? I was under the impression that the S and PTT were rather less efficient at highway driving than what I'm seeing, but maybe I'm wrong.

Prior to my PSeH, I was driving a Toyota Supra Turbo. Typical MPG was 14-15 city, and I never saw better than 22 MPG on the highway. My wife's Cayman S gets nearly identical numbers, which is why I assumed the S / PTT were in the same ballpark. My PSeH feels like a big leg up in fuel efficiency, even on gasoline alone. Throw in shorter trips where I'm using a lot of battery power and it gets ludicrous.

I do agree that you need to test drive alternatives. Don't just test drive a SeH like I did. Test drive an S as well to compare.

However, I think that most people who test drive a SeH and don't like the results make one basic mistake - they don't hit the Sport button. When it's not in Sport mode, the SeH is very focused on efficiency. It feels very sluggish as a result. It's not really comparable to the S unless it's in Sport or Sport+ mode.

The e-Power and unnamed hybrid mode (the mode you get when not in e-Power, e-Charge, or Sport) are fine when you're behind another car or cruising. The 400+ HP doesn't really help if you're behind some minivan.

Getting the most out of the car, then, is largely about switching back and forth between e-Power and Sport. Which is a rather deliberate process. You'd think it'd be no worse than manual shifting, which I'd done for 17 years before getting the PSeH, but it's a couple of small buttons among a sea of other buttons rather than a large shifter, so it's not something you can easily do by feel.

I thought maybe I'd do a lot of manual shifting before I bought. The car does have a manual mode and somewhat nonstandard paddle shifters. In practice, I found it impossible. Too many gears, 1st is very low and unspools before I can react, and sluggish response from the automatic transmission from the paddle shifters. Regular Panameras with PDKs are probably a lot better in this regard.

My feeling is that the PSeH is an S with an on-demand efficiency mode. If you don't think you can adjust to switching back and forth, and find e-Power an underwhelming driving experience (which it is), get an S. Or if you're in a northern climate like I am, a 4S.

 

how did it hold up in the snow? im further down south so didnt see any ... yet ..

 

It did quite credibly. I've only driven it in the city since the snow showed up, so a lot of the time I've been driving on roads that are essentially dry after plowing. However, I've had to drive over snow when edging around people, and a couple of times it was enough snow depth to present a serious hazard.

I definitely felt the traction issues, and the rear moved around around a little, but not a lot, and I never had any trouble advancing, no problem with spinning tires or getting stuck. There doesn't seem to be any sort of dash indicator when traction control kicks in, but I could definitely feel the car change behavior.

We've had little patches of ice on the driveway, like we get every year, and I couldn't feel those at all. I watched my neighbor struggle with spinning tires and serious sliding in his driveway with a front-wheel drive economy sedan, so I think maybe the car has taken the snow so easily that I've underestimated the challenges it faced.

The real acid test would be taking it on a completely snow-covered road. The time I remember best with the Supra was on roads in New Hampshire, where I really couldn't get above 30-35 MPH without feeling control issues. Until I do something similar with the Panamera I won't have a full comparison.

I'm driving on snow tires of course. I wouldn't recommend all-seasons in this car for snow.

 

Not sure either... I was loaded up (3 adults and luggage) and was averaging 80mph. The combined city/hwy rating is 22 for the cayenne... so 24 might be the norm on Cayenne for hwy runs w/o a full battery.

But as I mentioned in my post above, the high city & stop go numbers make up for it. That is where I spend most of my time here in Seattle...stuck in traffic.

 

80 MPH. That's why. Since wind drag goes with velocity^2, and distance with velocity, you can reasonably expect MPG to decrease linearly with speed once wind drag is your biggest energy cost.

Drag coefficients are 0.36 for the Cayenne, 0.30 for the Panamera. Back of the envelope says if I'm getting 35 MPG at 60 MPH, you'd get 35 * (60 / 80) * (0.3 / 0.36) = 22 MPG at 80 MPH. So it's in the right ballpark, roughly. Something I'm neglecting, or just a slightly lower average speed would account for the 10% difference.

 

Your math is spot on (except I think you have the multiple of 60 in your formula twice).

The speed limit between Portland and Seattle is 70 for a majority of the drive, thus my cruise at 80 At either end of the trip the limit is 60 (so realistic speed of 65 or so for those stretches), which probably accounts for the 24 actual MPG vs the 22 you calculated based on my 80mph comment.

Heck If I dropped down to 60 I would get 29mpg then (of course I would get flipped off for doing 60 in a 70)

 

So I did. It was one of those things where I edited what I wrote for clarity, and in the process of re-writing the equation I left something behind. Fixed now.

As for saving fuel by driving 60 in a 70 - if MPG were all we cared about, we'd all be driving Priuses. And honestly, fuel is the least expensive part of owning these cars. I think those of us interested in the e-Hybrid models are into it for the idea of a somewhat-electric car as much as anything else.

My own 60 MPH was in a 55. I used to push it more when I was in my early 30's, but I eventually decided that the process of getting ticketed upset me too much. So these days I usually keep my pleasures to getting up to speed as quickly as possible. Usually.