[_yb2s]

> not true to the essence

As a longtime Porsche fan that was exactly my first thought also when Porsche started making SUVs, but I couldn't have been more wrong. They're not just very much in the spirit of Porsches history- I find the SUVs to be more impressive and interesting than any of their sports cars.

The Porsche SUVs are really unique and impressive performance vehicles in their own right, each in different ways- especially the Cayenne. The Cayenne is indeed very similar to a VW Touareg, but the Touareg itself is nothing like other VWs and started out as a crazy expensive Piech era offroad supercar with V12 and V10 engines that is also the basis for the modern Bentley and Lamborghini SUV supercars. Look at YouTube videos you will see these same vehicles posting sports car worthy lap times on a track, as well as easily doing some of the most technical offroad trails. To me it's a mind blowing feat of engineering to make a single vehicle that can handle such opposed things, and do them both extremely well.

You can also find a lot of nice older Porsches for much less than 25 grand- 10 grand will get you a nearly perfect condition low mileage first gen Boxster or Cayenne these days.