Our 2024 Porsche Macan EV Is Death by a Thousand Cuts

• We've had a 2024 Porsche Macan EV in our One-Year Road Test fleet for nearly 12 months.
• It has not been everything we hoped.
• And more time behind the wheel is just making it worse.

Director of written content Brent Romans agreed: "One of my co-workers noted that our Macan EV does not have a rear wiper. Expecting that a $99,020 SUV should come standard with one seems reasonable enough to me, though a rebuttal could be that nobody would be complaining if we had just ordered one. (It's a $370 option.) I mention this because our Macan EV is missing another rather basic feature: extendable sun visors. You can't slide them backwards to cover all of the side windows. For me, this is annoying because my commute to the Edmunds office often involves early morning or late afternoon drives where I want to slide the sun visor back to cover the sun. Is there a $370 option to add sliding sun visors? I'd gladly sign up, but alas, I've gone through the Macan online configurator and cannot find any mention of one."

And that's not the only point of aggravation Romans noticed when the sun is shining. 

"I dislike the glossy black plastic panel that the Macan has for its climate control buttons," Romans wrote. "I've got three reasons: 1) It makes it really easy to see dust and fingerprints; 2) because there aren't individual separate buttons, you have to press the whole panel down to click it and get the button action you want; that process feels a bit cheap and low-buck to me; and 3) the shiny plastic can cause distracting sun glare in certain situations."

Brady also called out the build quality on the Macan EV, pointing to a constant rattle from the front passenger seat belt buckle when the seat is empty. That's the kind of thing you buy an expensive SUV to avoid.

If the Macan EV isn't sparing us from common annoyances, is it at least delivering a premium product in other areas? Not really. Yekikian had this to say about the Macan's sound system. 

"I'm usually quite fond of the Bose in Porsches, but this one? No highs, poor lows, bass that does nothing but rattle the door pockets," Yekikian wrote. "Really surprised that it's so unspectacular. Actually, unspectacular is too nice. It's average for any car, but when you think about a car that's very, very nearly $100K, it's just straight up bad."

What we (don't) get for the money

Lest you think it's all bad, video manager Will Kaufman leaves us with something to think about when considering the value proposition of the Macan EV. 

"'Value' is not the same as 'regret,'" Kaufman wrote. "We give all the cars we test a rating for value, which basically looks at what they offer for the money vs. what competitors offer. Now, in some cases, this can correlate to regretting your purchase: If you spend $X for a car and find out you could have gotten way, way more for your money later, you might regret it."

"Our Macan is objectively a bad value. We spent more than 90 grand, and we don't even have a surround-view camera. There are hard plastics and piano black around the cabin that just seem cheap (even if they're sturdy). The next Tesla Model Y Performance will absolutely blow it out of the water for both acceleration and range and be way cheaper."

"But, but I don't think you'd regret the Macan EV. See, I find it a very likable car. I enjoy how I sit in it, I enjoy driving it, I enjoy how it feels. And I've driven every major competitor for this car. I know I can get a better objective value, but if I had the money to spend on the Macan, I wouldn't regret buying it over something else."