The first generation Porsche Cayenne SUV launched in 2022, but many of us did not know that Porsche contemplated introducing three additional body styles of the Cayenne. Porsche has revealed that it considered introducing a Cayenne coupe, a stretched version with an extra row of seats and a convertible.
Out of the three, the Cayenne convertible was actually built as a one-off, which you see here, which is kept in storage at the Porsche Museum. The convertible, known as the Package Function Model (PFM) wasn’t able to drive on the road. Designers removed the roof and added additional elements to stiffen the body, but it was never designed to be a roadgoing prototype.
Instead of designing it to hit the road, Porsche used the one-off Cayenne convertible to evaluate four criteria. Is the seating comfortable with the more coupe-like roofline? How practical is it with only two doors? Can the soft top fold quickly? How should the rear end be designed? The last question about the design of the rear was the final issue, which lead to two different rear end designs. The left-hand tail light was set low on the rear of the car, while the right-hand one was noticeably higher.
At the end of the day, Porsche decided against the Cayenne convertible because it doubted its profitability.
An SUV as a convertible is a challenge both aesthetically and formally,” says Porsche’s Michael Mauer. “An SUV always has a large and heavy body. You combine this with a small top half and then cut off the roof – you get very strange shapes emerging from that.”
