2024 Porsche Panamera And Turbo Prototypes Playing Tag At The Nürburgring

The 2024 Porsche Panamera’s development team has been spotted putting the updated sedan through its paces at Germany’s Nürburgring.

Make that sedans plural, because our spy photographers snapped two different variants of the 2024 Panamera pounding the famous 13-mile forest track. Both cars appear to be wearing the same 10-spoke alloy wheels, but the different bumpers, spoilers, and exhaust tailpipe setups make it easy to work out which is top dog, even without the benefit of lap time data.

The first car’s front bumper has three evenly-spaced intakes at its outer edges, rectangular tailpipes, and a spoiler that rises directly from the base of the trunk lid below the rear window. But the second car’s four individual rear tailpipes (or tailpipe finishers, to be precise), and its special rear spoiler that raises from the trunk lid, then extends outwards, suggests it’s the faster car of the pair, perhaps a Turbo or Turbo S.

Neither of the cars wears the yellow hybrid stickers electrically assisted prototypes are required to display, so both must be conventional gas cars. That means both are likely to be running evolutions of the turbocharged V6 and V8 powerplants featured in today’s Panameras.

There’s some debate over how new the 2024 Panameras are. We suspect it’s an update of the current car, rather than all-new, but recent shots of the interior of a test car show that it will feel suitably fresh inside. The sedan’s dashboard and console borrows from the electric Taycan, giving the Panamera a fully digital dashboard, updated infotainment system, passenger screen and a small gear selector rocker toggle mounted high on the dash.

The one thing we don’t expect the Panamera to borrow from the Taycan however, is an all-electric drivetrain because that would make the two cars too similar. But Porsche is likely to extend the electric driving range of the PHEV from its off-the-pace 35 miles (56 km) variants to match the 70-mile (113 km) offered by recent luxury rivals such as the new Range Rover, Mercedes S-Class, and recently announced 2023 BMW 7-Series.