In the beginning there was a Hyundai Palisade in Portland, Oregon. Eventually there will be a Porsche Panamera in Agoura Hills, California. After almost exactly five years, this luggage test is the 157th. It will also be the last.
I started doing luggage testing for a couple of important reasons. First, we’re a blog that needs a lot of content. The more, the merrier. Second, I needed a secondary review format that didn’t require me to drive two hours or more across the country and then spend two hours or more writing. The acronym I’m looking for is “ROI.” Third, we get test cars so we can test them. This may seem obvious, but too often in this business, journalists treat them like weekly company cars. I’d usually do some other type of review with the car in question, but a luggage test would always be a bare minimum. And you know what? That bare minimum actually drew as much or more readers than various road tests and other review formats. I was as surprised by that as anyone else, but in retrospect, I had learned earlier in my days at Edmunds Inside Line’s long-term test blog that people loved reading these recurring tests (like “Will the Bike Fit?” or Dan Edmunds’ Suspension ToursThe fact that the luggage tests The actionable information people found through Google has enabled them to continue performing long after they’ve fallen off the radar. Autoblog front page. The acronym I’m looking for is “SEO.”
One thing I didn’t set out to do was become a leading expert on cargo capacity, but after 157 of these things, that’s pretty much what I’ve become. I now say things like, “That’s not 23.3 cubic feet,” or “That’s clearly measured to the roof instead of the seatbacks.” I’m sure my fellow editors were sick of getting a review back and finding the paragraph about cargo capacity full of red flagged edits. Well, not anymore. I move all the luggage out of my garage somewhere else.
Okay, let’s move on to the final episode of the series. The Porsche Panamera received a mid-cycle update for 2024and while it’s not entirely clear why, cargo capacity improved by a whopping 0.1 cubic feet to 17.7 cubic feet. That’s not the biggest cargo-related news for 2024, though: the The Panamera The standard, 911-style body is now the only one available. The Sport Turismo estate has been discontinued worldwide due to lack of demand (although it sold better in Europe, duh, that still wasn’t enough to save it). As we’ll see in a moment, that’s bad news for those trying to cram luggage into it; although The Sport Turismo had only 18.3 cubic feet on paper, the functional difference was actually enormous. Ah! And there’s another reason I did the luggage tests: they actually provided useful information!
Here’s the Porsche Panamera’s boot. It’s clearly a hatchback, which always makes loading easier. Look at the angle of that opening. That’s going to be a problem… for me and anyone else who owns the car.
The Panamera has a huge, rigid cargo area with sound deadening materials inside. As usual, I test with and without.
This particular car also had the “Power sunshade for the tailgate and rear side windows” package which costs $1,140 (you can also buy them separately, with the side sunshades costing $650 and the rear sunshades $500, saving you a whopping $10 with the package). You can see the rear compartment on the top right. It’s in a huge, heavy cartridge that can be removed. That’s why I’m going to test with and without it.
Please note that this is specifically a sunshade and not a cargo net as in the Audi Allroads/Avant. It doesn’t get fixed into the roof like they do. I’m sure it would stop something lighter from flying forward without damaging the hood, and I doubt anything bigger would get through the fixed headrests, but I don’t recommend relying on the hood to secure your load.
There is a surprisingly deep space under the floor. It is mostly filled with the battery and a flat patch kit, and the remaining space isn’t big enough for even the nice bag, but I bet you could fit a 12 pack of something in there. So I guess we have a hooch bin! Yay.
Okay, let’s get started. As with every luggage testI take two medium sized airport checked trolleys (26 inches long, 16 wide, 11 deep), two black trolleys that just fit in the overhead bin (24L x 15W x 10D), and one smaller green trolley that fits in easily (23L x 15W x 10D). I also take my wife’s luxury weekender bag to brighten things up a bit (21L x 12W x 12D).
It’s probably fitting that my final luggage test is probably one of the most difficult and tedious I’ve ever attempted. Simply put, it’s pretty tough to fit rectangular boxes into a large triangle. You end up with a lot of unused space and bags that prevent the tailgate from closing. You can see above how my smallest roll extends past the tailgate line.
That being said, here are the three tests.
Test 1: Cargo cover and sunshade pattern in place
Option 1, top left, consists of the two largest bags and one of the medium-sized bags with some room left over for a small shopping bag and maybe(?) a flat garment bag.
Option 2, the other one, the largest bag, a medium bag, the small roller bag and the fancy bag. Maybe you could add a garment bag to this one too, but either way, there’s questionable usable space left.
For comparison, this was the sadly defunct Sport Turismo. This one had a roll-out cartridge luggage cover that could stay in the car AND fit all the bags.
Additionally, you can see here that the longer roof allowed me to stack the bags on top of each other in a way that is impossible in the standard 911-shaped body. The rear of the trunk is also higher, making it easier to stack bags and providing more voluminous recesses on each side of the trunk for cramming bags into the corners.
In principle, this is a good example of why measuring cargo volume in cubic feet doesn’t tell the whole story. That measurement is one of volume, which tells us more about its ability to be filled with liquid or, perhaps, ping-pong balls. While the Sport Turismo could only carry 0.6 cubic feet more ping-pong balls than the standard Panamera body, it could carry a lot more cargo.
Let’s also give a compliment to the Sport Turismo while we’re at it.
Test 2: Luggage cover out, sunshade in
Okay, so I just threw the other big bag on the last Tetris formation and left it at that. The other bag definitely did not fit. You can really see all the wasted space here.
Go ahead!
One more note on these. They are heavy! The sun canopy is a hefty piece (no wonder the Panamera weighs so much! Hefty but well-designed things like this add up), and not only that, I literally had to climb into the trunk to put it back down because the trunk is so long. I’d say I’d skip this option, as well as the dual sun canopy, and just pay the $650 for the electric side sunshades instead.
Test 3: Luggage cover and sunshade removed
You see, by removing the jumbo sunshade cartridge, I could now lay the largest bags on their sides AND push the bags all the way up to the seat backs. This allowed me to fit the five largest bags inside.
BUT! I still had the problem with the slope of the roof.
Something would definitely fit in the remaining space, but it would not be a fancy bag. Whether I placed it on the upper right corner or the lower right corner, it was squashed to an unacceptable degree. It would not fit if it was packed full of stuff.
So the Panamera couldn’t fit all my bags. And that, my friends, is what we call a conclusion. In more ways than one.