Paris 2016: Porsche Panamera rewards the decisive

Porsche’s latest Panamera does that very neat trick that the best Porsches do – having an innate quality that’s hard to pin down, but just makes you want one. The previous-generation car didn’t quite have that certain extra je ne sais quoi, but the new one really does, helped by the fact that its cabin really moves the game on (finally) for the sports-car brand.

The IP is dominated by a large, landscape-oriented central screen that holds the controls and settings for just about everything in the car. You can’t even adjust the angle of the centre air vents manually – you have to select the ‘central vents’ tile on the home screen and drag your finger around until you reach the preferred angle of wind.

The screen works extremely quickly, the graphics render relatively nicely, although some of Porsche’s font and colour choices seem to date from an analogue age – certainly more from a time when you could adjust your own air vent manually, that’s for sure.

But the big question we have is that the big screen and its plethora of menus sits a fair way from the driver, and while all functions work all of the time, we wonder how easy and/or distracting it would be to change some of them when driving at speed in a car that rides relatively firmly. Hopefully the ‘auto’ settings for many functions work a treat so you only have to set the car up once. It also has the benefit of cutting down on greasy finger marks that quickly smear their way across the cabin.