• Spacious for four, but no five-seat option at launch
• Well-sized boot is a very practical shape
• Tailgate brings a welcome dose of flexibility

How much space is there?

The Panamera is a big car, and offers plenty of room inside for its four passengers; Porsche has hinted that it may offer a five-seat version in the future, but the fifth seat will only be suitable for short journeys.

Compared to the previous version, the latest Panamera has a great distance between the front and rear wheels, freeing up more room inside the cabin – which is especially noticeable in the rear.

Boot space and storage

Similarly, the 495-litre boot is 50 litres bigger than before, and Porsche has done its best to shape it to make it better at swallowing suitcases. Fold the rear chairs over and this expands to 1,304 litres.

Despite Porsche’s insistence that the Panamera is a saloon, it’s really a five-door coupe with a large tailgate to access the boot.

Safety

• Lots of active safety technology available
• Advanced new InnoDrive ‘co-pilot’ system
• Night vision option

There’s no Euro NCAP rating for the new Panamera, and curiously, Europe’s independent crash test body generally doesn’t test cars at this prestige level. But with part-aluminium and high-strength steel construction, eight airbags and highly sophisticated electronic stability control as standard, it should be at least as safe as anything else in this class.

Optional safety equipment for the Porsche Panamera

Porsche does offer a number of options to top up safety levels even further, including:

• Night vision, which uses a thermal camera to help you spot pedestrians and animals earlier at night, complete with colour highlighted warning
• Lane-change assistant, which is basically a long-range blindspot monitor
• Lane departure warning, which alerts you if you’re about to cross out of your lane without indicating; the same camera that controls this also recognises road signs and displays them on the dashboard
• Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) with stop and go function

The LED Matrix headlights also count as a safety upgrade, since they aim to give you the best possible illumination at night without dazzling other motorists – which is achieved by constantly adapting the light beam.

Then there’s Porsche InnoDrive. This is a new system that uses sat-nav data to predict the road for up to nearly two miles ahead, and combined with the adaptive cruise control claims to ‘optimise’ the engine, gearbox and braking, taking corners, hills and speed limits into account.

This predictive data is then filtered via information coming in through all the car’s on-board cameras and sensors as you drive. Apparently it makes the Panamera more efficient, and is yet another step on the road towards autonomous driving. InnoDrive was only available in the UK from 2017 onwards.