London - Arabstoday
You’ve just bought a Porsche Cayenne Diesel. Congrats, you’ve got your hands on an excellent all-rounder, all you need now is an evening attire, a pair of rubber boots and maybe some diving equipment, as this car can really do everything. So, you start the engine for the first time and... you’d like to hear something aggressive coming from under the hood, but this doesn’t happen. The six cylinders act as if they were compressing diesel inside a library. You go back to the house, open your browser and start typing “Porsche Cayenne Diesel tuning” Wait! is it a good idea to mess with what the Porsche engineers and maybe also with what the designers did? We found out the answer during a surprisingly sunny British spring day, when we visited UK tuner Kahn and drove their version of the Cayenne Diesel, the Supersport Wide Track. The Show As the car is being lowered using an internal elevator, we remind ourselves that Kahn actually calls himself a design house and thus we’ll be dealing with more exterior and interior mods rather than tech ones, but the Brits have also played with the mechanical side of the Cayenne. Thus, before we got to find out if Kahn’s stainless steel quad exhaust system, which comes from Blue Flame, can do something for the sound of the Cayenne’s diesel unit, we were staggered by the aggression of the wide body kit fitted to the SUV. You’d never guess that there’s a diesel engine hiding under the fat wheel arches and if you take a look at the lower bootlid spoiler, or at the roof one, you could swear you’re dealing with at least the 500 hp of the Turbo version. And those wheel arches, which come with LED daytime running lights, hide a set of monstrously cool alloy wheels that come in a 22-inch size and look like Italian leather shoes that a designer would wear on the debut of his new collection. And for those of you who also want a bit of color, take a closer look... through the web of spokes and you’ll notice what Kahn calls a liquid gold finish for the brake calipers. You can look at the car form every angle and be sure that it will stand out even your car is parked among others that cost at least as much as it does in front of a top-class hotel. Of course, the pearl white paint also helps, with this contrasting strongly with the privacy glass and the matte black door handles. While touring the Kahn facility, it became clear that the design department is the focus. These people really take a car back to the drawing board and also use the concepts that prefigured the car to restyle it and for the Cayenne they obtained a good balance between standing out and crossing the line.