Audi’s RS7 has been around for a bit, but Porsche’s Panamera Turbo is fresh-as-a-daisy, having just been released late last year with deliveries just now starting to trickle to their new owner’s driveways. Both of these big German lux sedans are ludicrously fast in a straight line (they share a very similar powerplant), and they are both lusciously comfortable for four full-sized adults. Being that the Panamera is newer, is it better? Has Porsche appreciably improved on the formula for creating a super fast living room on wheels? Everyone we know who has driven the new Panamera has thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and it sure is a nice place to sit inside for a few hours of high-speed Autobahn running.
Naturally, the best place to compare these two cars is at a drag strip. Wait, what? That’s right, PistonHeads took this pair of beasts to the famed Santa Pod Raceway for a few blasts down the strip to see which one was fastest. It’s plain to see that neither of the drivers in this video have ever drag raced before, and the guy in the Panamera evidently didn’t know how to use the launch control function properly. None of the launches are properly impressive for a pair of big-power four-wheel-drive saloons, and the video host skipped the lights by a huge margin on his first run, but anyway, they were fast. Keep your foot in the throttle and keep the steering wheel straight and you can manage an impressive 11.7 second run in the Audi and 11.4 seconds in the Panamera.
These results are interesting to us, as the Audi RS7 Performance has 605 horsepower, while the Panamera Turbo makes do with just 550 horses under the hood. So aside from having the better interior, and arguably the better-looking sheet metal, the Panamera is also faster with less power? I guess that settles the argument, then.
