Making one of Porsche‘s most luxurious, most cosseting cars even more comfortable is no small task. Doing that while also improving its speed and handling prowess sounds like a proper magic trick, but that’s exactly what the marque’s engineers set out to do in creating the 2025 Porsche Panamera. After a day spent hustling a few different flavors of the sedan on the roads of Seville, and a neighboring racetrack, we’re impressed by the revisions.
Though it doesn’t look much different on the outside—a bit more angular and upright, and certainly more modern—the third-generation Panamera has been significantly retooled to widen its performance envelope, pushing greater into the plush, limousine side of the equation while also refining the on-track excitement aspect.
And the key to both sides is suspension. For this new Panamera, steel springs have been banished. The entry-level suspension is a new, bi-valve, twin-chamber adaptive air suspension that can adjust rebound and compression near-instantly and dynamically. That means it can adapt to allow for more or less movement in both phases of travel, dialing in extra comfort or better handling.
And it’s genuinely good. Cruising through Seville, running over broken asphalt or speed bumps in a Panamera 4, we find that the base suspension delivers an excellent ride experience, even with low-profile 21-inch tires. But, out on twistier roads, the suspension offers equally admirable response, so that the new Panamera still has that unexpectedly nimble feel.
If, though, you go with the Turbo E-Hybrid, you can add Porsche’s new Active Ride suspension, which raises the bar even further. This suspension takes advantage of the onboard high-voltage system in the plug-in hybrids to power four pumps, one per corner, which can almost immediately alter the suspension at every corner—on the fly.
When you’re driving for performance, this can be used to keep the car flat through corners by stiffening the outside of the vehicle while softening the inside. Or, under braking or acceleration, it varies suspension stiffness from front to rear. When you’re just cruising, you can set the car to lean into the corners, a little bit like a motorcycle, which Porsche says will give passengers with sensitive stomachs an easier time. The Panamera can even spring up a little over two inches when you open the door, making settling down into this low-slung sedan easier on the knees, back, and posterior.
All this suspension alchemy feels a little odd from behind the wheel. Hustling around Circuito Monteblanco, north of Seville, it took a few laps to get used to having a car with virtually no body roll through the corners. It was also odd to be able to tackle the curbing as hard as we liked without it upsetting the big sedan in the least.
But even more strange was when we set the suspension in comfort mode, slowed down, and weaved back and forth, feeling the car rock from left and right, leaning into a corner. It made the machine feel like an active partner, not just a means of conveyance. The overall effect is radical, something that really changes the game for this large sedan.
You can’t talk about the Turbo, though, without talking power, and there’s plenty of that. The new Turbo E-Hybrid offers 670 hp and 685 ft lbs of torque from a revised 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8 and an uprated hybrid system. The big story is the electric portion of the power train, with the battery pack now offering 25.9 kWh of capacity and the motor capable of delivering 187 hp and 331 ft lbs of torque before you fire up the V-8.
Porsche hasn’t given a formal range rating for U.S. models yet, but on the European test cycle, it said the Turbo E-Hybrid can go more than 55 miles on a charge. That’s a considerable jump over the current Turbo S E-Hybrid’s 31 miles of range, and could make for an emission-free commute.
Get deeper in the throttle, though, and the combined systems deliver tremendous torque. That engine may be turbocharged, but the extra power from the electric configuration means instant throttle response, even coming out of high-speed sweepers on the track.
The braking is just as good. There’s none of the awkwardness that you can sometimes get in a hybrid. The brake-by-wire system here ensures a firm, steady pedal every time. Add all that power and performance to a revised interior offering a clean, straightforward design and way more tech and personalization than before, and you have a decidedly improved model variant. One drawback to the new model line, though, is that the wagon-shaped Sport Turismo variant is no more. Porsche is offering only the more traditional sedan body style for now.
Porsche’s latest Panamera raises the bar yet again for how good a performance sedan can be, but the prices have been raised to match. The new Panamera starts at $99,900, or $106,900 for the Panamera 4. As for the Turbo E-Hybrid, it will almost certainly be north of $150,000, although the entry price has yet to be set.
Click here for more photos of the 2025 Porsche Panamera Turbo E-Hybrid.
