• This is the second of a three-part series covering the development of the Porsche Cayenne sport utility vehicle. This development drive in January 2002 took the Porsche test team into the Australian Outback in the heat of a surprisingly wet summer Down Under.

It's no wonder that Australians cling to their coastline. Venture inland just a few miles and you approach the Outback, a harsh, featureless netherworld that extends more than 2,000 miles across and nearly that far from top to bottom. Unlike Lewis and Clark, Australian explorers Burke and Wills died in their exploration. John Stuart finally made it, but returned home suffering from scurvy and nearly blind.

The north-south road through the Outback bears Stuart's name, but this arterial supply line wasn't paved until 1987. While the coastal communities have Interstate-like superhighways, the Stuart remains a two-lane country road. But at least it's there; there is no east-west road across the Outback, just a few dusty tracks.

"If an alien probe landed here it would say 'no life' and go home," Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Horwitz writes of the Outback, which spans an area about the size of the contiguous United States west of the Mississippi River. But instead of majestic mountains and national park vistas, there is a still, flat sea of rock and sand and scrub, unbroken by any kind of meaningful topographic feature - with one amazing exception.

Smack dab in the middle, floating like a gigantic red iceberg, is Uluru, the Rock formerly known as Ayers, and just a few miles west of Uluru are the Olgas (or Katra Tjuta to the Aboriginal Anangu people), which look like a cluster of smaller red icebergs melting quickly under the intense Outback sun.

Uluru is an awesome red-rock cathedral, and you immediately understand why the Aborigines consider it holy ground, especially as it appears to change shape and color - and sometimes, in Outback optical illusion, location -- as the sun moves across the sky, exposing shadows, textures and creases that remind you of the wrinkles around your grandmother's eyes.

Uluru would be a major tourist destination on any continent, but it's even the more spectacular here because it is surrounded by so much, well, so much nothing.

But you must be motivated if you want to see Uluru with your own eyes. For starters, Australia is 24 hours from anywhere. Leave home and you consume the next full day before landing at an airport on the continent's coast. Then you must endure two or more long days driving through a boring, blistering flatscape into the heart of the Outback.

Fortunately, our drive isn't boring. While others have tried to penetrate the Outback with everything from camels to canoes (an 1844 expedition in search of an inland sea), our rides are prototypes of Porsche's new Cayenne sport-utility vehicle. Our tour guides are the engineers charged with making sure that while this new vehicle is a genuine SUV, with all of the off-pavement abilities needed to survive the Outback, it also is a true Porsche that excels, and accelerates and stops and turns, on pavement.

Think of this as the Ultimate Car Guy's Adventure Tour. We're exploring one of the world's most exotic lands in a super-secret and still much-disguised automobile with the engineers responsible for the vehicle's development, for verifying that the Cayenne will be worthy to wear the Porsche badge.

"People pay for visiting such places and they would pay to drive such a nice car. We get paid for both," says Juergen Kern, a more than 20-year Porsche engineering veteran and co-leader of this traveling Cayenne test team. "We really do enjoy this job."

What's not to like?

Kern may be enjoying his job, but Michael Pfeifer is the proverbial kid in the candy store.

Pfeifer cherishes memories of the day when he was six years old and heard a neighbor drive down the street in his new 911. "I want to drive a Porsche," he told his mother. "You are a crazy boy," his mother replied.

Even Michael may have wondered if he was crazy when he graduated from engineering school and discovered Porsche wasn't hiring, leaving him to work for the truck division of Stuttgart's other automaker for a several years. But Porsche finally had an opening and just five weeks into his new job Pfeifer was told to drive a 944 Turbo prototype to the Nardo test track in Italy for brake testing. He's been driving and developing new Porsches ever since. He was part of the group that developed Porsche Stability Management (PSM) for the 911 and his team built the PSM system for the Cayenne, a complicated task because of the way the technology must interface with center differentials and adjustable air suspension and work both on and off pavement.

We're well into the second day of our drive toward the heart of the Outback when Pfeifer announces from the driver's seat that, "we're going to do a lane change."

"Usually we do this on the test track at Weissach," he adds, explaining that usually "it's not good to do on the normal road."

A normal road has normal traffic, but in the middle of the Outback normal traffic means an on-coming vehicle maybe once every half hour. Even then, normal in the Outback isn't normal anywhere else. In the Outback that oncoming traffic might be a "road train," an Australian aberration that has one semi-tractor pulling as many as four trailers. After seeing such a behemoth for the first time, the Porsche engineers try to calculate how long it might take to get such a beast up to speed, and then how long it could take to bring its mass to a stop.

All of the vehicles in the Porsche caravan have two-way radios and Pfeifer checks with the lead car to make sure the road is clear. Then, without any hint of relaxing the pressure his right foot applies to the gas pedal, he jerks our Cayenne abruptly into the adjacent lane, and then he darts back to our original lane. Immediately he repeats the process. Everything and everyone stay nicely composed.

We're just settling back to enjoy the rest of the ride when Pfeifer announces that we're going to try it again. Except now he has dropped well behind the vehicle in front of us, and then he tips his right foot much closer to the floor. We're approaching 100 miles per hour when he repeats the back and forth and back and forth maneuver that might send any vehicle, especially an SUV, somersaulting off into the bush.

The Cayenne responds like a jet fighter in dogfight mode. Yes, this is a real Porsche, even if it is has its engine in front, provides seating for five and has a hatchback roofline.

Finally back in our lane, and back to normal speed -- but long before the back-seat passenger's heart rate has returned to anything near normal, Pfeifer smiles and fellow chassis engineer Eugen Oberkamm calmly announces, "the PSM works" as he returns to the notes he's been making all the while about the vehicle's various systems and how well its switchgear functions, and, oh yes, we'll need to check the seal at the front edge of this sunroof because Oberkamm heard some air leak as Pfeifer tried to rip the chassis from its wheels.

Entering a time warp, and a town under ground

This Cayenne test drive began in Adelaide, a modern city of a million people who live 750 miles west of Sydney and on the Gulf of St. Vincent, an arm of the Southern Ocean.

Even on Australia's southern coast, we quickly learn that we are in a strange part of a strange land. We're informed that we are on Australia Central Standard time and should set our watches back by half an hour. Like Afghanistan, Iran, Newfoundland and few other places on the planet, we're in a half-hour time zone. If it's noon in Sydney, it's 11:30 a.m. in the middle of the Australian continent. Seems the Aboriginal people had it right all along with their concept of "dreamtime" in the Outback.

As if time itself isn't strange enough here, we spend our second night literally "in" Australia, in the Desert Cave, "the world's only underground international hotel" says the brochure we find in our room hewn from rock. The Desert Cave is part of the underground town of Coober Pedy, the Aussie translation of the Aboriginal phrase for "white man's hole."

As you approach this "town," you see what appear to be anthills punctuating the landscape. Except ants didn't make these hills. They are created by people mining for opals. Coober Pedy produces 70 percent of the world's supply of these gemstones

Other than opals, Coober Pedy is known for unbearable heat and apocalyptic dust storms, which is why the hotel and a church and many homes and businesses are built under ground or into rocky outcrops.

Yet there are worse places you could attempt to inhabit in the Outback. For example, just to the west of Coober Pedy is Nullarbor, a vast area that got its name because it has no trees, and just east of Coober Pedy is "Lake" Eyre, which is 49 feet below sea level and is Australia's largest salt lake, at least on those occasions when it actually has any water.

Cultural commentator and humorist Bill Bryson describes Australia as the "driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile, and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents." Oh, and just for good measure, he warns that "it has more things that will kill you than anywhere else" on the planet, and he then provides a long list of the snakes, spiders, ticks, crocodiles, sharks and even caterpillars that can end your life. "In short," Bryson summarizes, "you don't want to be caught in the outback."

As we are about to discover.

Hemmingen, we have a problem

We were some 850 miles into our drive when we stopped at the roadhouse at Kulgera, just across the state line into Australia's Northern Territory, one of perhaps four places on the planet that still posts no speed limit on its open roads.

In the flat but dangerous sea that is the Outback, a roadhouse is a lighthouse, a place of refuge and relief: Fuel station, emergency repair shop (selling hoses, belts and such), snack bar, tavern, campground and motel, all rolled into one, and all sort of rolled back into the mid-1950s. We're not talking modern Interstate cloverleaf exchange truck stop or Four Seasons (or even Three or Two Seasons, for that matter). We're talking a gravel parking lot and a few dusty buildings.

But travelers stop at every roadhouse, in part because you never want to run out of fuel in the Outback, in part because you need to drain the liquids you took on at the last stop -- and you need to restock with enough fresh fluids to get you through the next leg of your journey -- in part just because the roadhouse provides a shady break from the monotonous glare of the sun. We'd like to call it a cool, shady break, but the pointer on the thermometer on the wall of the covered patio at Kulgera points to triple-digit numbers on its Fahrenheit scale.

While the Cayennes and other vehicles are refueled, we hit the snack bar for those staples of the Australian road diet - a Chiko (sort of large, chicken-flavored egg roll), fruit (fresh or dried), a candy bar (love that Cherry Ripe, but some prefer Violet Crumble) and water, soda or a locally bottled and amazingly refreshing lemon-lime beverage.

While we're gathering up our goodies, the folks at the roadhouse speculate about our vehicles, which are covered in black, matte-finish cladding that's further camouflaged with wide, angular, taped stripes. At such stops, the cars are vulnerable to those most loathed of creatures - automotive journalists and spy photographers. At night, the cars are completely covered. Even at brief stops along the route the cars are parked with the Cayennes hidden as much as possible behind the support vehicles that carry tools, tires and technicians.

"I know what they are," the lady at the counter proclaims while the cars are exposed at the gas pumps. Long pause… "They're those new Land Rover Freelanders," she says, proud of her automotive knowledge.

Upon hearing this news, Porsche test team co-leader and trail boss Peter Hass beams. "So, the camouflage works," he says, admitting that there was much internal debate before the trip about how much disguise the Cayennes should wear for this trip only some nine months before the start of production.

But Hass' smile almost immediately turns upside down. After being refueled, one of the Porsches won't start. The car is pushed under a tree. Its hood is raised, dashboard panels are removed and laptop computers are hooked into various sensors. Codes are punched into the keyboards, then more codes, and even more codes. But still, it just won't start.

"Engineers are always trying new things," one of them explains. "Some are better. Some are not."

The problem appears to be that for some unknown - and the moment unsolvable - reason, the anti-theft system has been tripped and has locked the steering wheel and disabled the ignition. As we wonder if Cayenne owners may be glad to know the Cayenne's anti-theft system is so good that even Porsche engineers cannot steal their own car, Hass is on the satellite phone, trying to reach engineers back in Germany, even though it's like 3 a.m. (or would it be 3:30 a.m.) there.

It seems that the problem might be hardware, not software. New parts are being sent from Germany, but until they arrive, the car will have to be towed.

No worries, mate, she'll be apples

"Usually, when you carry something you don't need it. You need what you didn't bring," Juergen Kern says. "But fortunately this worked quite good."

Fortunately, that is, because on their last visit to the United States, Kern saw a military-style tow bar and thought it might be a good addition to the Porsche test team's kit that it hauls, whether it needs it or not, from Germany to the Yukon and to northern Sweden in the coldest of winter weather, to the Outback, Dubai and the American desert to blister in the sun, and through mud and up and down mountains in Spain and on off-road trails in the western United States.

Making the best of a bad situation, the engineers realize that this setback in the Outback is another opportunity to test the Cayenne's capability as a tow vehicle in high heat. However, someone will have to ride in the disabled - and thus non-air-conditioned -- vehicle because there could be a situation in which the emergency brake may be need to be applied. But who to stick with such an awful assignment? The team leaders make the decision: They'll suffer; Hass takes the first shift and Kern the second.

Even after we reach our hotel near Uluru, engineers and technicians spend three more hours trying to figure out what's wrong with the car. Work resumes early in the morning, although no one is optimistic. The car likely will have to be towed again, all the way to Alice Springs, the Outback's only real city, where Cayenne managers are flying in for their final evaluation drive before reporting back to Porsche chairman Wendelin Wiedeking and Ferdinand Piech, a Porsche family member who retires soon as chairman of Volkswagen, Porsche's partner in building and painting the Cayenne's chassis.

As electrical engineer Arno Wunderlich stands next to the crippled car, explaining possible sources of the problem -- how five systems must talk to each other, how temperature might have had an effect, how it could be as simple as a bad solder, but why they'd most likely have to wait for a new ignition switch to arrive from Germany, Sascha Kissner, a "comfort electronics" (heating/air conditioning/ventilation) specialist and, at 29, the youngest engineer on the trip, turns the key and the Cayenne resuscitates.

Wunderlich stops speaking in mid-sentence. Kissner's face breaks into a wide if surprised smile. Fists are thrust jubilantly into the air.

"That's why you test," Kern says calmly, explaining that this and any other potential problems must be discovered in the development process, not after the car is in customers' hands.

Speaking of hands, Kerns hands and arms are red. "I hope it turns brown, to tease the people back home that I've been on an expensive vacation," he teases. But he knows that while some assume he's been on vacation, those at Porsche will know that the test team has no time for reclining in the sun, that such sunburn comes from having a problem.

The consensus is that high temperature caused two electrical contacts to separate, preventing the necessary electronic communication. But the switch will be studied and the problem will be solved. That's why Porsche does such extensive hot and cold weather testing, and does it under real-world road conditions, not just on test tracks.

"What's important isn't the trouble, but what happens afterward," says noise/vibration/harshness engineer Jochamin Maunz.

Speed thrills

For the next two days, our real-world road conditions involve very little pavement. Only the first few miles we drive from Uluru to Alice Springs are on paved roads. When we reach "the Alice," the engineers and technicians will spend most of a day prepping the cars for the management evaluation drive, which will include high-speed pavement (remember, no speed limits here) as well as time at a special off-road venue used to train the rangers who patrol the Outback in high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicles.

The Cayenne already has proven its capabilities on some extremely high-speed pavement. On the famed road course at the Nurburgring, where more than 160 turns put handling to an extreme test, the Cayenne Turbo posted lap times as fast as those of Porsche's own Boxster S. Imagine, an SUV is as fast as a sports car.

Cayenne project manager Egon Verse, the man who will report to the chairmen, adds that the 444-horsepower Cayenne Turbo owns the eighth fastest lap ever posted by a road vehicle in testing at Hockenheim, Germany's Grand Prix circuit that features two extremely long straightaways. "And that includes sports cars," Werse says proudly. (As Werse left for Australia, the Cayenne S with its normally aspirated, 334-horsepower V8 was at Hockenheim. "I think it is in 12th place," he says, adding that the next fastest SUV on record was the BMW X5 4.6, in 20th place.)

The Cayenne Turbo can hit 165 miles per hour on the test track. The Cayenne S will do 150, and has completed a durability run on a high-speed oval running at its top speed for nearly 750 miles while stopping only for fuel. We'll not approach those speeds today, although we'll get closer than you might expect.

Although this is the Outback's dry season (aren't they all?), a storm has come in off the Gulf of Carpentaria and several communities in the Northern Territory are flooded. Each year, the biggest festival in Alice Springs is the Henley-on-Todd Regatta, a waterless spoof in which bottomless boats are run along the dry bed of the Todd River. But by the time we arrive at the Alice, the usually dry Todd is a torrent.

Along the way, wipers must move gallons of tomato soup-colored slop from our windshields. But our usually dusty route is wide and appears flat, and we have it all to ourselves. Still, the road's shoulders are littered with tire carcasses, shredded reminders that this can be a very unpleasant place to travel.

Such horrible conditions are just the right place to experience some of the Cayenne's amazing capabilities, and of the driving skill of the Porsche engineers, who make only small-degree inputs to the steering wheel as we run at rally-stage speeds. But speed doesn't mean foolishness. Safety is stressed constantly, at meetings and on the radio. When we return to paved roads, the cars are stopped so tires can be inspected. (We're making this drive across the Outback on high-performance tires that should be more susceptible to damage on unpaved roads. Making the test team's work more complicated is the fact that Cayenne will come with a range of 10 different tires - summer, winter, all-season, off-road -- the most ever for a Porsche product - and all must be thoroughly tested. Even the winter tires make a full-speed run around the Nurburgring.)

At one point the paved road narrows to a single paved lane for several miles. Hass reminds everyone that if we meet a road train we'll pull over and stop until it passes. But even while stopped, testing continues.

"We are never resting. We test even in traffic jams," Kern says, explaining that no one's happy when stuck bumper-to-bumper in traffic, and that in such situations customers have time to seek out anything they might criticize, perhaps even some fine detail of switchgear they hadn't noticed before.

The only traffic today is our private Porsche caravan. One particularly wash-boarded area provides an opportunity to verify that the CD player doesn't skip and that the buttons on the radio can be reached and manipulated from the passenger's seat even as the car is beaten into a blur by the road surface. Engineers even move from the front seat to the back to evaluate the rough-road comfort of a new foam compound that's being considered.

We suffer no tire troubles, but we do stop to check a suspension component after we splash out of a huge but submerged pothole. And while a new exhaust pipe bracket has been installed on some of the Cayennes, one on an older prototype has broken loose and we stop a couple of times to bungee it back in place until we can use a welding torch in Alice Springs.

Also on the docket at the Alice is installation of a new instrument panel in one of the vehicles. When the Cayenne managers arrive from Germany, one goes directly from the airport to the garage. He opens his suitcase and there on one side are his clothes and shaving kit, on the other are new gauges and various switchgear controls.

It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it

In testing, everything is checked and rechecked and then checked again. Notes are made. Days in the cars are long, and even after the daily driving is done, the cars must be maintained and reports written and meetings held and assignments made and correspondence sent back and forth to Germany and -- eventually - there's dinner, and maybe a glass of one of Australia's remarkably good wines or of the local Redback beer (named after a deadly - of course -- Australian spider).

"We're proud," says Kern. "We want to tell people that this is the perfect new Porsche. But we have to hide everything."

Sometimes, the concealment is difficult to maintain. Pfeifer remembers when he was testing an early Cayenne prototype, one equipped with an Audi steering wheel, complete with its four-ring emblem. But one man who peeked inside the car immediately knew it wasn't an Audi. "It's a Porsche," he proclaimed, recognizing the makeshift back seats. "I have those same seats in my car."

Indeed, the back seats had come straight from a Boxster.

Soon, however, instead of prototypes, the team's work will be displayed in the production version of the Cayenne. But even then, the test team's work isn't over. "We keep on testing," says Kern.

Development doesn't stop when production begins. There are new options and special packages in the works. A new generation of engine management software has just been tested in Sweden, where it's still winter, and is on its way to the Outback for hot-weather testing. Also scheduled before the cars leave the island is a test that will involve all of the various grades of fuels from all of the international markets where the car will be sold.

"I don't see any chance to retire," says Kern.

Why would he want to?