Porsche Cayenne Arctic Route Adventure

Day 19
Arctic Route Adventure: the conclusion

After travelling more than 10,000 km, the crew aboard the convoy of Porsche Cayennes made it safe and sound back to Vancouver. The scenery was breathtaking, the route was extremely challenging at times, and every participant enjoyed the ride. Mixing up Italian Porsche clubbers and Canadian journalists also made things pretty interesting.

Now that the trip is over, we thought we'd keep you up to date with the vehicles themselves, and in what condition they finished the adventure.

In the first part of the trip, the Cayenne Turbo was damaged in a loss of control on a slushy highway. It was towed from north of Prince George, BC, back to Vancouver and is being fixed. Total damage: $27,000.

The base Cayenne V6 suffered from overheating issues in the first part of the trip. By selecting the Sport mode, the transmission is prevented from shifting into gears 7 and 8, and keeping engine revs at around 3,000 rpm prevented the V6 from getting too hot. Once the group reached Anchorage, the truck's ECU was re-flashed (yes, there's a Porsche dealer in Alaska) and was running fine on the drive back down.

The V6 model and the Cayenne S Hybrid, which didn't encounter any problems, will return to Porsche's press fleet. The two Cayenne S models equipped with V8 engines, including the one that pulled the trailer, will be sold.

Two windshields will need replacing due to cracks, and the Porsche people installed 3M clear bras on each vehicle to help prevent stone chips.

The spare parts stocked in the trailer that accompanied the convoy weren't used. The two windshields they brought along will be used to replace the cracked ones, while no tire needed replacement and no Cayenne required an extra quart of oil.

So there you have it. We hope you had as much fun reading about the adventure as we did living it. We invite you to check out our photo gallery of the trip for some excellent shots of the breathtaking scenery, some hairy animals (including Matt) and a few very dirty Porsches.

Matt, Lesley and Rob