Porsche Panamera Sport Turismo hybrid interior, dashboard & comfort

The Porsche Panamera’s interior is a precision exercise in understated looks that only emphasises the sense of quality. Its dashboard is impressively high-tech, with a widescreen system and touch-sensitive switches, but also fairly easy to use.

The seats are a doddle to get comfortable in and you can pay extra for even more adjustment than standard. Still, at least you get most of the basic equipment you’d want as standard, including heated seats, automatic wipers, LED lights and two-zone climate control.

Porsche Panamera Sport Turismo hybrid dashboard

The Panamera E-Hybrid’s dashboard is dominated by the huge, landscape-orientated touchscreen that you can read about in more detail below. Suffice to say it’s a great, glossy, hi-tech portal into the car’s soul and all that resides there, and you’ll enjoy using it as much as you’ll enjoy the tactile mix of materials, and the way the car’s raised central spine gives each front occupant a sense of their own separate environment.

Touch-sensitive buttons line the top of that raised tunnel, operating the variable dynamics and climate-control systems, as well as offering shortcut buttons and a rotary controller for the screen. They click as you press them, so it’s easy to know when you’ve activated a function, and they look brilliant, but are rather prone to fingerprints.

You also get the Sport Chrono pack as standard. This is Porsche marketing-speak for a launch-control function (wickedly fun and alarmingly easy to activate) and the funky circular analogue clock on top of the raised dashboard, which can also serve as a stopwatch and lap-timer.

Ultimately, the Panamera's dashboard can be a bit confusing at first, but the switches are labelled clearly and arranged logically, so it doesn’t take long to get to grips with. You'll love the pervasive sense of quality and precision that Porsche has imbued into every detail of the Panamera’s interior.

Equipment, options & accessories

Porsche is a master at delivering what appears to be a healthy standard equipment list, until you start looking into the available options and discover that a lot of aspects need enhancing at extra cost if you want the best car. The Panamera E-Hybrid is a great example of this. It comes with automatic wipers and LED headlights, cruise control, two-zone climate control, leather upholstery, plus front and rear parking sensors and a reversing camera, which sounds great.

However, the list of items that you’ll probably want to add remains lengthy and expensive. Key optional extras include upgraded seat adjustment, keyless entry, a head-up display, a reversing camera, adaptive cruise control and ambient interior lighting – and that’s on top of the optional sports exhaust, metallic paint and charging extras that we’d recommend to make the most of your Porsche.

Even if you forego things like the panoramic glass roof, alloy-wheel upgrades, soft-close doors, lane-keeping assistance and still more tempting extras, a fairly moderate box-ticking exercise can see the Panamera E-Hybrid Sport Turismo sporting tens of thousands of pounds of extras.

Infotainment, apps & sat nav

This is one area where Porsche actually gives you almost all the equipment you could want, including the brilliant 12-inch touchscreen, navigation, wireless Apple CarPlay, Bluetooth hands-free and audio streaming, DAB radio, USB, voice control – you name it, it’s got it. The only optional upgrades are for the sound system, with Bose or range-topping Burmester setups on offer.

You can add a CD changer as well, and anyone likely to carry kids in the back regularly will definitely want the USB input back there, and possibly even the Porsche rear entertainment system, with removable 10-inch touchscreens mounted on the back of the front seats. It’s pricey, though, so a standard tablet and aftermarket seat mounting system could save you a lot of money.
 
The touchscreen system is easy to use once you’ve gotten used to the sheer volume of information and features it offers. It can be controlled by scroll wheels on the steering wheel, as well as the dash-mounted rotary button and shortcut toggles, but most will use the touchscreen itself.

There’s dedicated hybrid information giving you energy readouts and power-flow graphics, as well as the setting to activate pre-warming or cooling and dedicated charging times to make the most of off-peak tariffs. Overall, it’s one of the best systems going – right up there with BMW’s iDrive.