Some of us still recall the cries of heresy from the unenlightened when the management team at Porsche announced the company would field a sport utility vehicle offering. Firmly entrenched in Porsche’s legacy as a builder of sports cars, these people’s fears swirled around the potential dilution of the brand. “How can Porsche build a SUV without tarnishing the luster of the badge?” they wailed.
Time, experience, and the subject of this 2015 Porsche Macan Turbo road test & review have shown that rather than diluting their brand with its SUV offerings, Porsche has actually elevated the SUV to a place people had never considered it to be capable of occupying. And, in so doing, the company has established itself as a dominant player in a very popular segment of the marketplace.
Further, the move may well have saved the company.
The fact of the matter is had the Porsche management team not done the Cayenne and doggedly stuck with building only small sports cars, Porsche may well have fallen by the wayside. Of course, given the success of the Cayenne, a smaller Porsche SUV was perhaps inevitable. New for the 2015 model year, the compact Macan (which means “tiger” in Indonesian and is pronounced MA-CAHN) has arrived.