Considering widespread success enjoyed by the ground-breaking and benchmark-setting Taycan, it would have been easy to think development of the all-electric Porsche heralded the Panamera’s demise. After all, both cars fulfil a broadly similar brief insofar as they’re upmarket sports saloons offering plenty of refinement complementing the undoubted dynamic talents associated with modern Porsche products. And yet, here we have the allnew G3 — well, it’s known as G3 in the corridors of Zuffenhausen, but known as the 972 to marque enthusiasts — taking the Panamera into 2024 and beyond.
Just looking at the car on these pages should make it immediately obvious Porsche has hardly thrown the baby out with the bathwater. While there are enough telling visual clues to suggest you’re staring at the new Panamera, by the same token, it’s not a radical design departure from the G2 (971), which served from 2020 until earlier this year.
First things first, the 972 will only be sold as a fastback model. The handsome 971 Sport Turismo, while supposedly offering greater practicality than the standard body style, only has boot space a little larger than that of its regularbodied counterpart, resulting in less than ten percentmakes zero financial sense for Porsche to bring the Sport Turismo back for the 972 line-up, even if it pains us to write as much — the Sport Turismo was a glorious-looking sports car.
