• Interior is hugely appealing
• Build quality feels top-notch
• Excellent comfort levels

How is the quality and layout?

The Cayenne Coupe features Porsche’s a high-tech interior that’s exceptionally well built, if not exactly luxurious unless you raid the options list. The driving position is spot on, with an excellent relationship between the wheels, pedals and seats – as well as a great view forwards.

The facelift brought a new curved digital panel in place of the previous gauge cluster, as well as rearranged the centre console so it more closely echoes the Porsche Taycan EV. This means the gear-selector has relocated to next to the steering wheel while below the large infotainment touchcreen sits a large touch-reactive panel for most of the secondary controls.

This is clever, and pretty, but not very easy to use. Similarly, setting-up the digital dials as you prefer takes a bit of figuring out. Best done before you start driving.

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Infotainment and tech

There’s also something of a learning curve to the widescreen infotainment display. There are an awful lot of different menus and submenus, and you’ll need to spend time familiarising yourself with it all. Once mastered, though, the range of features you can control is very impressive. We also like that the wireless charger for your smartphone is now located in an air-conditioned cubby to reduce the risk of overheating.

Those ‘buttons’ on the lower centre console are a bit of a mess, though. Fingerprint marks are rife, and finding the consistently thing you want to control will take some time. You select what you’re trying to control by pressing on an illuminated icon, but to actually activate it you have to press rather hard, and the whole panel moves as one. We can’t help but wonder how much nicer it would be with actual buttons.

Comfort

• A wide variety of seating options
• Excellent comfort and support
• Refinement is good

The Cayenne Coupe is available with a selection of seats, which can be specified in some particularly wild colours (personally we rather like Blackberry, a dark purple that combines surprisingly well with satin gold trim).

The standard electric eight-way adjustable seats are supportive and remain comfortable after a couple of hours behind the wheel, but don’t come with lumbar support adjustment. The optional comfort and sports seats fix this, and bring a multitude of other adjustments, too.

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Comfort-orientated rather than overtly sporty seats are more popular in the Cayenne generally, but if you’re the sort to try and push the Coupe as fast as it will go, you may find yourself sliding around a bit. We had some time on track and found ourselves clinging onto the steering wheel and bracing ourselves against the doors in the corners.

This reflects an exceptional demonstration of just how fast the Cayenne Coupe can go, however, so is less likely to be a big issue on the road. Refinement is good for a Porsche, where big wheels with fat tyres often leads to lots of road noise. The engines sound good when you can hear them, though, and the E-Hybrids can run completely silently on electric power.