Porsche wraps a 4-door hulk in racy corset

FROM ELMAU, GERMANY — The new Porsche Panamera is the best-handling big sedan in the world, which I grant is a little like being the smartest kid on the Arizona State football team or the most chaste governor of South Carolina. No matter how hard you try -- and Porsche's engineers have busted their adorable lederhosen here -- a 4,344-pound, 16.3-foot four-door cannot beguile physics like a sports car, and it certainly cannot be made to handle anything like a 911.

The Panamera thus presents Porsche with a problem of brand ontology: What is a Porsche? If you've spent much time in a Boxster, Cayman or 911 Carrera, new or old, you know the feeling of these cars: cold-rolled and heat-tempered, hard and light, nap of the Earth, edgy and reactive, ineffably masculine, a disposition that is to other sports cars what Dexedrine is to Geritol.

The Panamera is none of that. Compared with a 911, this thing handles like well-upholstered field artillery.

There's nothing flickable or silver-heeled about the Panamera, and although its limits are truly spectacular -- the Turbo model with the Sport Chrono package can carrier-launch from zero to 60 mph in 4 seconds, generate 1 g of cornering force and brake to a stop from 188 mph in a tongue-unraveling 7 seconds -- the Panamera requires nothing so much as deliberation at the wheel.

This is a big car (76 inches wide on a 115-inch wheelbase) with a mighty 4.8-liter V8 up front (400 horsepower, or 500 hp in turbo trim).

There's no trailing-throttle oversteer bringing the tail around as there is in a rear-engine 911. No capering through the esses. Yes, you can make the Panamera do amazing things. Bring a whip and a chair.

Porsche's chieftains know they are trying to bridge a conceptual gulf here, so you'll notice the advertising harping on this notion of this gran turismo being a "true" Porsche, to the point of protesting too much. I take a different view. It's a car made by Porsche, with breathtaking engineering that is routine for Weissach. The materials are exquisite, the seats are fantastic, the four-seat interior design is the best on the market and the whole thing is so summarily pleasurable it makes me want to empty out the nearest FDIC-insured facility with a tommy gun, a la John Dillinger.

To nail the throttle, and bring all 567 pound-feet of torque online (in Sport Plus mode), is to know the giddy excitement of falling into a black hole. That 1,000-piece horn section that must have played unceasingly in Richard Wagner's balmy head? It's in the exhaust.