Drive a Porsche, Sleep on the Roof: German Backroads Tour
A tent on top of a Porsche is a whole new luxury experience. Here’s how the sports car-maker looks to tickle both your right foot and your sense of adventure.
Some luxury hotels will pick you up from the airport in a Porsche; other luxury hotels are Porsches.
This is one of them. It’s called the Porsche Roof Tent Experience, and it’s an adventure of the sort we’d never have expected from the brand best known for corner-crushing sports cars.
Porsche pitches the Taycan Cross Turismo as more than just an electric sports car. It’s a wagon, for a start. It’s also lifted, wears rugged-looking plastic cladding around the arches and rockers, and comes with tires more suited to gravel than the Nurburgring racetrack.
Now, Porsche has designed two new rental car camping “experiences” to help you take the Taycan Cross Turismo and its rooftop tent there. On the curated tours, you’ll spend 3 days carving up German roads in either the Black Forest or the Rhine River’s wine country.
Taycan Cross Turismo Camper
To make it perfectly clear Porsche is serious about the rough-road adventure capabilities of the Cross Turismo, the automaker has launched a new camping experience with a pair of new tours.
Two completely different adventures let you spend your days carving up German backroads and your nights sleeping on top of your Taycan.
For the tours, the two-person tent mounted to the top of the Taycan comes with blankets and pillows. Porsche will also provide other “outdoor equipment.”
It’s a bold move from Porsche, and not just because it’s making a luxury travel experience happen in a tent mounted to the roof of a car.
We’re not exactly sure that a large tent strapped to the roof of an EV is going to handle its best on high-speed German highways, like the Autobahn. Or when you’re carving up backroads. Then again, Porsche knows what it’s doing.
Black Forest Adventure Foray
The first adventure takes 3 days in the Black Forest. Starting with an airport transfer from Stuttgart, you get a Taycan Turbo S Cross Turismo EV to share with one other driver, two nights in your roof tent, and activities.
This tour lets you tear up the Black Forest. It also has zip lining in Hirschgrund and a sunrise hike to the top of the Feldberg — the tallest mountain in Germany outside of the Alps. Hiking, e-biking, and standup paddleboarding are also available during the outing. Porsche will even have a food truck at your campsite because camping outside doesn’t mean roughing it.
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Rhine-Hesse Wine Ramble
Porsche’s other Roof Tent Experience is 3 days in the Rhine-Hesse wine area. You get the same Porsche and a guided drive along the German Wine Route. That includes sparkling wine tastings and a dinner from Michelin-starred chef Philipp Stein.
There is a wine-drinking hike on trails in Alsheim and more wine tasting. And you get to sleep in your Porsche roof tent among the vines of the Raumland Sekthaus vineyard and winery, one of the most exclusive in Germany.
While the Black Forest tour focuses on driving as much as the outdoors, the Rhine-Hesse trip is heavy on experiencing amazing things. You’ll also get more time to learn about your car, as Porsche focuses on “the finer details of your Porsche, the region, and the tour.”
Choose Your Own Porsche Adventure
Porsche will run the Roof Tent Experience tours on three sets of dates in 2022.
The Black Forest Foray will run May 17-19 and again September 6-8, while the Rhine-Hesse Ramble will take place May 31-June 2.
Both events are priced at €2,490.00 (around $2,600 with current exchange). That’s per person, and you’ll probably want to bring a guest — unless you want to share a roof tent with a random stranger.
The tours come with 3 days of driving (two drivers per car), airport transfers, activities, and meals. Porsche will have a luggage shuttle in case you’re planning on staying in Germany longer and need more gear.
We’re leaning toward the driving tour with some hiking over the winery tour. Hangovers and fast-driving sports wagons don’t go together all that well. But either way, a 750-horsepower, 2.4-second 0-60mph electric wagon with a house on top sounds like a lot of fun.
Porsche Travel Experience will customize either tour for you and can even help develop one tailored to you. Learn more, including how you can opt to put a tent on top of a 911 coupe, at the new Porsche Roof Tent Experience website.
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