Cayenne EV, £20k V8s, unpopular car opinions

... and Sam Sheehan joins as our new co-host!

By Cam Tait / Tuesday, 25 November 2025 / Loading comments

So the cat’s out the bag. With John announcing last week that he’d be moving on to pastures new, we’ve only gone and nabbed PistonHeads contributor Sam Sheehan to fill his vacant seat in our stuffy podcast studio. Sam’s been part of the PH family since he joined as a staffer many years ago, during which he became one of the lucky few to drive a Porsche 911 RSR GTE car and filmed a real hair-raiser of a video on the Giulia Quadriofoglio GTAm. More recently, he’s been driving the new Vauxhall Mokka GSE and, from today, will be sat alongside me in the pod booth. Lucky him.

What a week to make his debut, too, because our first port of call is the long-awaited electric Porsche Cayenne which, in Turbo guise, gets 1,156hp and up to 387 miles of range. Big numbers for the biggest car the company makes, and that comes as no surprise for an EV costing £130,900 for the range-topping Turbo, but it’s the 0-62mph time of 2.5 seconds and a Bugatti Veyron-matching 7.4-second 0-124mph time that, in a car weighing as much as a cruise ship, is really quite mind-boggling. However, without a big V8 roaring away up front, it does make you wonder whether Turbo will be worth it, or if getting the model with the longest range will, like many other EVs, be the one worth buying anyway.

To introduce Sam to our usual buying challenge, I found a topic that I knew would send him off to the classifieds full of glee. Posted by Tam_Mullen, the goal here is to find something with a big V8 in it, the only caveats being that it needs to be resilient enough to start after small periods of inactivity and fit within a £20,000. Sam found some exceptional candidates, ultimately landing on this Jaguar XFR with 47.5k miles on the clock. It’s a tad on the pricey side and a smidgen over budget at £21,950, but it looks to have been well cared for and has apparently had a fair bit of money spent on it recently. Meanwhile, I managed to find a Lexus IS F, which not only ticks the big V8 box but, as it’s engineered by Toyota, it shouldn’t throw up any nasty surprises. Don’t forget to add your own suggestions here.

Rounding things off, we go through the ‘unpopular car opinions’ topic started by youngricharduk. There are some properly rage-inducing confessions in there, such DeejRC’s hatred of all BMW M5s and Shermanator’s belief that anyone who can sense the difference between a regular M4 and a CS is, in fact, lying. Sam chips his own in by revealing how underwhelming he finds the EP3 Civic Type R, while I finally pluck up the courage to proclaim my hatred of the Rover 75 and all it stands for. You can tell me I’m wrong and put your own forward in the topic here, but give the pod a listen first, eh?

Listen here