One of the problems (and there are many) with reshaping a modern SUV into a “coupe” variant, like with the new 2020 Porsche Cayenne Coupe, is that the minimized roofline only makes the body look that much more awkwardly tall and bloated. But with the magical powers of photoshop, we can fix that.
Earlier this week, I reviewed the new Cayenne Coupe, and I said I didn’t hate how it looked, I didn’t mind calling it a coupe, and it drove just as good as the regular Cayenne, which is also a good car.
But I also complained that certain parts of the design tend to show off just how ungainly tall the Cayenne has become as the model has bloated over time, and sloping down the roof just shows off how much visual mass there is in cars these days.
A coupe roofline works on a car body style because it’s not too tall and won’t get all slabby, but on a modern SUV, it starts to look more like a half circle—a big ball of car.
But commenter Unacceptably Dry Scones went above and beyond, and took my complaints and reworked a photo of the new Cayenne Coupe to remove a lot of the mass the vehicle has seemed to gain over the first-generation of the Cayenne back in 2003:
Here’s the two versions of the photo side by side:
And compare that to the first-gen Cayenne:
Essentially, what Dry Scones has done is shown us a Cayenne Coupe with proportions closer to that of the first-generation Cayenne, and funnily enough due to the editing, the fascia even looks incredibly similar.
And I think it looks great! I’m not sure what Porsche would have to do to make this work, but it’s looks like, hypothetically, it would be somewhere between the size of the actual Cayenne and the current Panamera, like some bizarro wagon, which would make it more of a crossover, which should be possible!
But in our reality, the Cayenne is as big as it is probably because it has to be for various safety and technical reasons, and as modern SUV coupes go, the Cayenne is probably the better looking one.
But it’s all made up, and this is just an interesting exercise in seeing just how big modern cars are, and just how sporty and speedy the Cayenne Coupe could look if it wasn’t so dang tall. Thanks for the photoshop Scones.