This. Ruined. Everything. (It Didn’t.)
2015 Porsche Cayenne Diesel
(This listing is from Bring a Trailer.)
It’s hard to say how this listing managed to gloss over the fact that this is is not just a Porsche Cayenne, but the first Porsche Cayenne. This is the reason the Urus exists. It’s the reason Benedetto Vigna spent two weeks last year drinking Sassicaia straight out of the bottle while working up enough courage to greenlight the Purosangue.
It’s how Porsche managed to create a universe where they didn’t have to kill the manual transmission with the 911R, because it turns out that you can do whatever you want when you have an SUV-shaped money-printing machine in Stuttgart that can operate for multiple decades uninterrupted. (What’s that? The money printing machine acted tired for a minute? BOOM—Macan. Problem solved.)
If you weren’t paying attention at the time, it’s hard to overstate just how unheard of this was when it happened. Sacrilegious, even. But goddamn did it turned out to be the formula for something special. Because while enthusiasts are for some reason slow to admit it, a fast and capable SUV is all that you need to have fun buzzing around town, while also being approximately 1000x more practical than anything you’re going to find that has three pedals and cargo space that could be measured in units of McRib.
(No, that wasn’t a stupid sentence. A 911 can hold less than 500 McRibs. That might be a lot of McRibs, but it doesn’t translate very well into golf bags or suitcases or groceries that aren’t limited edition bone-shaped meat benefiting from artificial scarcity and proprietary barbecue sauce.)
Anyway, this is not only the first Cayenne, but it’s a diesel. You could overland in this thing. You could survive an apocalypse with it. You could drive the piss out of it for another decade and it’ll keep coming back for more, provided you perform the recommended maintenance with German sentimentality.
Sure, you could buy a new one, but if you’re the type of person to be checking out 10-year-old Porsches on bring-a-trailer, you’re the type of person to know what other 10-year-old shit you could be picking up for a modern Cayenne’s $85,000+ sticker price.
We should all be glad that these exist.
Now let’s make you the kind of person who is glad they own one.
