Potentially an oxymoron, the Sport Sedan category is hit or miss; with the Porsche Panamera Turbo it is definitely a hit!  Combining luxury, speed, and four doors, the Panamera handles like a dream.  Rear-axle steering enables it to grip tight turns while triple-chamber air suspension softens jolts and bumps from uneven surfaces.  The Panamera Turbo’s newly designed bi-turbo V8 engine generated 550 hp and 568 lb-ft of torque to reach 60mph in less than 4 seconds.

Performing at the level of a 911 Turbo 997, the Porsche Panamera Turbo is the world’s fastest luxury sedan.  To demonstrate the Panamera Turbo’s drivability professional race-car driver Lars Kern took it for a spin on the famed Nordschleife track aka “Green Hell”.  Completing a lap within 7:38 minutes, Kern marveled “How can that much luxury go so fast?” and noted, “The car is so tremendously agile, it’s astonishing!” 

With Panamera Turbo’s new eight-speed dual-clutch transmission that operates in both automatic and manual mode, many wondered which mode Kern was using when he set the new record.  “When we started the test-drives I was shifting gears by hand,” he says. “But then our engineers looked at the data and said, ‘The transmission can do it better.’ And so that’s what I did in the lap of 7 minutes and 38 seconds.”