2020 BMW X3 vs Porsche Macan

What's the difference?

Big fast SUVs have long been a guilty pleasure of mine. My brain has been telling me for years, since the first time I drove one - the first-gen Audi SQ5 - that they're silly and wasteful and 'not my kind of car'.

The Europeans - and latterly, the Americans - seem to be playing to an audience of me, convincing my prejudiced head that my try-anything heart is right: over-engined, jacked-up, stiffly-sprung family wagons are as much fun as anything else.

The X3 M is BMW's first full-fat M version of the X3, a car that has never really fired the imagination until this third generation. First we got the very good X3 M40i, now we have a 375kW, twin-turbo straight-six screamer, the M Competition.

In the grand scheme of Porsche as a brand, an SUV like the Macan is as controversial as it is inevitable.

I mean, we’re talking about a brand with a fan-base which turned its nose up at the entire concept of water cooling, let alone having the Stuttgart crest defiled with a bloated SUV body.

The march of time and changing tastes of the world have had their way with Porsche though, and the reality is, if those fans still want to see the iconic 911 continue much further into the future, they’ll just have to accept the only reason the storied automaker can stay alive at all is because of SUVs like the Cayenne, and the car tested here, the Macan.

Is it all bad news though? Does the Macan earn the Porsche badge? Would you really sit one next to a 911 in an all-Porsche garage? We took a second-from-the-top GTS to find out…