Billed as “one of the most extensive product upgrades in the history of Porsche” by the firm, the new Cayenne has already been put through its paces in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America, covering more than four million test kilometres in prototype form.

Ramping up to its appearance at Shanghai, the SUV took on extreme conditions in desert, snowy and rugged mountain terrains, with Porsche engineers testing the model’s new semi-active chassis. Tests also included over 200,000km (124,300 miles) spent in urban traffic, on motorways and on country roads. 

Porsche said it has been testing the Cayenne as if it had been “developed from scratch”, with the goal of “achieving an even wider range between the typical Porsche on-road performance, long-distance comfort and off-road capability.” 

Towards the end of last year, Autocar exclusively drove a pre-production prototype of the new Cayenne. Read on to see what we thought…

Driving the 2023 Porsche Cayenne prototype

It’s early morning as a fleet of camouflaged new Porsche Cayennes leaves a Los Angeles hotel’s underground car park.

They join the traffic and run in convoy along the back roads of Venice Beach and Santa Monica, before reaching the Pacific Coast Highway and heading farther north beyond Malibu in search of challenging canyon roads.

These early-build prototypes, both in conventional SUV and coupe bodystyles, have been at the centre of a demanding test programme along the California coast and in Nevada’s Mojave Desert for almost a month.

Now, before they’re all flown back to Germany, where they will be torn down to study the wear and tear on various components or pushed into further testing duties, it’s our turn to discover how Porsche has tried to raise the Cayenne’s appeal against ever-growing competition from the likes of the BMW X5, Mercedes-Benz GLE and Range Rover Sport.

This ‘facelift’ is clearly more than just a token update. In fact, the changes are quite extensive, due to the decision to continue production well beyond what was planned at launch in 2017.