🏎 Max Finds The First Car Ever To Be Named...

Gm, it is FRIYAY.

Idk if you all are into motorsports, but Sunday is like the Superbowl of car racing.

At 9am we have the F1 Monaco Grand Prix.

At 12 we have the Indy 500.

and at 6, yours truly is going to be attending his first ever NASCAR race, the Coca-Cola 600.

I’m psyched, and I think all those subconscious NASCAR juices were what made me write about two VERY American cars in the last couple editions.

SO, today when I started my search, I decided to switch things up a tad…

And somehow I ended up finding a car that has a big ass V8, is heavy as hell, was a top of its class at off-roading, and SOMEHOW IS NOT American…

In fact, much like the GTO, it might’ve been the saving grace for this particular manufacturer.

HERE

IT

IS

A 2006 Porsche Cayenne Turbo S

& much like the spice of its namesake, its a true all-rounder!

• 🌏️ Driven around the world: 4.5x

• 🎼 Song to Get the Vibes Right: Porsche Cayenne ft. Riff Raff

  • Hilariously, the background car is a Porsche Panamera. NOT a Cayenne. Guess Turo didn’t have a Cayenne available that day for the music video.

• 🏇 Can beat 512 horses in a fight

• 💰️ Predicted Price: $21,955

• 📆 Auction Ends: Tuesday, May 30th, 2023

Now, most folks (not any of you, of course, you would not be so naïve) probably see this car and think:

“Max, this is a boring ass grey SUV. I’ve seen a million of these on the road, they’re not interesting.”

WRONG. Quite wrong.

Let’s cut to the chase,

What Makes The Cayenne Turbo S So Cool?

• It’s PRETTY AF, No Matter What Jeremy Clarkson Says

• It SAVED Porsche from bankruptcy

• It was the Worlds FIRST Performance SUV

It’s PRETTY AF, No Matter What Jeremy Clarkson Says

This is less an objective fact or history lesson, we will get into facts and history in subsequent sections.

This is more a plain and simple CORRECT OPINION.

“Max this is the least spicy looking Cayenne I’ve ever seen, and I’ve eaten a lot of tacos in my day”

FINE. Yeah, its not an exotic car.

But dammit, this thing is aging REALLY well.

When it came out, the Cayenne got more than its fair share of criticism.

My dear friend that I have never met before, Jeremy Clarkson, said (AND I QUOTE) “I’ve seen more attractive gangrenous wounds” than the Cayenne.

And that it has “less sex appeal than a camel with gingivitis.”

I, for one, have never seen a gangrenous wound.

And no, I will not be googling it for the sake of this newsletter.

I have, however, encountered a camel who (judging by his breath) I suspect had gingivitis.

I prefer this car to that camel.

So, in this case, Sir Jeremy is quite wrong.

It SAVED Porsche from Bankruptcy

Or, rather, it was part of the master plan that saved Porsche from bankruptcy…

but I digress.

Porsche was in a pretty rough spot when the 1990’s rolled around.

It was, at that time, a very small company compared to other German giants like BMW and Mercedes.

In 1992 BMW sold 65k cars in the US. Mercedes sold 63k.

Porsche, who was competing with certain BMW’s and Mercedes with its ‘budget’ models (the recently discontinued 944, the 928, and the 968), sold only 4000 cars in the states that year.

What that meant was, when Porsche was trying to compete with BMW and Mercedes, it didn’t have the economies of scale & manufacturing efficiencies in place to keep costs low.

This meant their budget cars were still expensive as hell.

Porsche’s market share, margins, and cash reserves were dwindling year by year.

Then, a dude literally named WEED KING was appointed CEO at Porsche.

Okay, fine, technically the spelling is Wiedeking. Wendelin Weideking.

Weed King was a no-nonsense dude and immediately did some major shit:

1. Hired Japanese manufacturing experts to improve the company’s efficiency

2. Axed the poorly selling 928 and 968

3. Pushed out the first ever Porsche Boxster (the new mini 911) that became a great seller and is still a staple of the lineup today

4. Modernized the Porsche 911 (partially via water-cooling the engine, a fact that most Porsche people HATE about this generation of 911… but that is a topic for another day)

5. AND KICKED OFF DEVELOPMENT ON TODAYS CAYENNE

Without these manufacturing modernizations and tactical additions to Porsche’s model lineup, its very possible we would not have a Porsche in the world today which is CRAZY to think as they are generally regarded as making the best all-round cars in the world right now.

tldr;

The Weed King made some controversial moves, but at the end of the day he and the Cayenne are the reason we still have Porsche doing its thang.

So we at MaxFindsCars.com are pro Wendelin.

OH, one last thing… Kind of a fun fact for everyone except Wendel.

Wendelin was the type of dude who shoots his shot.

The main reason he’s not with Porsche today is that he was forced out after failing a HOSTILE TAKEOVER of fellow German manufacturer Volkswagen in 2009.

The crazy thing is… it probably would have worked had us idiots in the US not been stacking sub-prime mortgages like an ill-fated global jenga game at the time.

Porsche now falls under VW’s umbrella, so… you can guess how his attempt worked out.

It was the World’s FIRST Performance SUV

So with Porsche back on the up & up, Mr. Wendel decided it was time to enter a burgeoning market and build a luxury SUV.

Porsche wanted this SUV to be the best at EVERYTHING in its class, because DAMMIT, THAT IS WHAT PORSCHE DO, and they succeeded.

This Cayenne had a TWIN TURBO V8, OVER 500 HORSEPOWER, and a 0-60 TIME OF 4.2 SECONDS.

IN TWO THOUSAND AND SIX.

The Cayenne Turbo S was truly a first of its kind. NO ONE had built an SUV like this before.

It was comfy, it was fast in a straight line, fast around corners, AND it was legitimately highly capable off road.

It had shit like air suspension (to increase ground clearance on rough terrain), a factory tire inflator under the passenger seat, a refrigerated glove box (for…sandwiches I guess?), and locking differentials! In A LUXURY SUV!

Brief aside into Max’s Education Corner (TM) because I didn’t know anything about this until… recently:

WTF Are Locking Differentials?

And why are they ALWAYS BROUGHT UP when talking about off-roading a car/truck?

First, your car’s differential is a mechanism that allows your wheels on each side of the car turn at different speeds. This feature helps with making turns becauuuuuuuse your outside wheel has to travel further than the inside wheel, and as such needs to spin faster.

A Locking Differential is a differential where you have the ability to force your differential to basically NOT DO what differentials do. When the diff is locked, your wheels move at the same speed, no matter what.

This effectively helps when you are in rough terrain and tires/wheels are frequently hitting large bumps or even elevating off the ground - it ensures 100% of the engines power is being used to spin the wheels which helps with rough terrain traversal (apparently).

ANYWAYS

The Cayenne Turbo S literally was better than every other SUV on the road at the time. It had more features, was more capable, faster, more solid, AND… well… it was heavy AF.

This car literally weighs twice as much as my car and is still faster which… annoys me.

So yeah, long story long, this thing effectively created the high performance SUV niche that EVERYONE is now building a car for. Even Ferrari and Lamborghini are in the mix.

These days, the first generation Cayenne is getting a bit of a cult following in the ‘overlanding’ and off-roading communities given its unique combination of features.

There’s a company local to me, Eurowise, that builds these absolutely SICK kits to convert them into off-roading beasts, and frankly they look way more cool than they have any right to be.

Check this out:

I seriously considered getting one during the pandemic, because for some reason I thought that now that I was spending all my time at home, getting an off road capable car was a necessity.

Hindsight 20/20, this made NO SENSE.

Instead, I did the logical thing and bought a car that is filled with mice and electrical gremlins.

But yeah, I’ve never owned an SUV, the closest I’ve been is my high school Mazda Protege 5 (which is somewhere between a hatchback and a wagon).

But if I was going to buy an SUV today, it’d probably be this one. Frankly, its one of those cars that made me immediately go to autotempest.com and start searching for them to see if I could get one on the CHEAP.

If anyone has any experience with these maintenance-wise (or in general), let me know in the poll below!

I’m in the market for a road trip car and this is a CONTENDER.

And remember…

MaxFindsCars.com is not, technically, free! By subscribing, dear reader, you have agreed to tell your friends about it.

In fact, I believe the contract specifically stated you had to each subscribe 100 of your closest friends, colleagues, enemies, exes, priests, pets, & sugar mommas. I’ll have to check the fine print to be sure, but you all may as well get started spreading the word in the meantime.

That's a wrap for today. New Editions come out every Monday and Friday! While you wait, go out and drive! And if you want more, be sure to follow Max’s Twitter (@maxjzin)

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