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Our Cars: Porsche 911 Carrera
2 years ago
The allure of a Porsche 911 remains deep-rooted
There is a theory that says the 911 is actually quite a boring car. When James May came on The Intercooler podcast earlier this year, he confessed that despite being a serial 911 owner, he does sometimes think they’re just a bit dull. I know someone who had a basic Carrera quite like this one as a courtesy car from Porsche for a short time; he reckoned it was so lifeless in normal driving he might as well have been in a 3 Series.
Do they have a point? Possibly. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing. After honing and refining the recipe for 60 years or so, Porsche has polished the 911 to such a high shine you could tie a full Windsor in its reflection. Ergonomically and practically, it just works. The quality within the cabin is exceptional, too. It feels as solid as a bomb shelter in there. Only the two small gauges in the instrument cluster that are mostly obscured by the steering wheel let the side down (and I understand that’s been rectified for the updated 992.2 model).
Ride comfort once you’re up to speed is very good, visibility all around you is excellent, there’s far less tyre roar on the motorway than in the past and the steering is light and easy. It all means the Carrera is as undemanding as a family saloon in normal use, which depending on your point of view either makes it too dull for words or the most broadly defined car of its kind.
"You could drive a 997 911 back then and still believe it was designed and built by a company a fraction of its actual size where a small handful of cars pop out of the factory each day, not a couple of hundred of the things"
But there’s no doubt something has been lost. As recently as the 997-generation model, in production until 2012, the 911 had a kind of low volume, almost hand-built charm about it. By then Porsche had grown into a very different sort of organisation, but you could drive a 911 back then and still believe it was designed and built by a company a fraction of its actual size where a small handful of cars pop out of the factory each day, not a couple of hundred of the things.
That impression leaked out of every shut line and crevice of those 911s. The way the door handles felt as you pulled them, the release for the glovebox, the chuntering sound of the engine, the car’s compact size, even the font used for the minor switchgear – all that stuff made it feel like the product of an idiosyncratic and proudly independent car maker. That sense is long gone, the 911 of today now a more homogenised machine, its kinks and creases knocked off it and ironed out by another decade of development.
“I came to what I think is a meaningful conclusion: the entry-level 911 is no longer the kind of car you would stash away in a shed to use on weekends. Perhaps that was true of the previous model too, the 991, but at no other point in the 911’s history has it been the case. It doesn’t feel special enough for that nowadays”
So yes, I can well understand why some people might think the 911 Carrera lacks character. After all those hours and miles in the driving seat of this one, I came to what I think is a meaningful conclusion: the entry-level 911 is no longer the kind of car you would stash away in a shed to use on weekends. Perhaps that was true of the previous model too, the 991, but at no other point in the 911’s history has it been the case. It doesn’t feel special enough for that nowadays. And you can’t get a manual gearbox. The Carrera has become so good at being just a car that it forgets it must also be a sports car.
Or so you might think. The reason I don’t buy into the boring 911 theory, and why I actually endorse the evolution of the 911 in the last 10 or 12 years, is that you need only flick the little button on the dash labelled Sport and start shifting gears with the paddles yourself to awaken the sports car within. Kick this 911 along a road and it comes to life – its twin-turbo flat-six sounds sweet and shoves the car across the landscape as hard as I ever need to go, the steering becomes beautifully accurate and exceptionally well weighted, body control is sublime, grip enormous and, most important of all, every single part of you that makes contact with even the smallest bit of the machine will feel what’s going on. You are connected to this car, in tune with it in a way you would never credit after pointing its nose along a motorway for two hours.
Both are 'basic' 911s, but deliver thrills in very different ways
This is one of those split personality cars. Besides, if you really don’t want your 911 to feel too normal, you only have to upgrade from the bottom of the range Carrera to the Carrera T – with its standard fit manual transmission, now a six rather than the slightly awkward seven-speeder – to buy a 911 that feels like a true sports car in everything it does. They may lurk alongside one another in the lower reaches of the 911 range, but their characters are really quite different, as Andrew discovered in a back-to-back comparison a couple of months ago. (Back then the cost to upgrade was marginal; now the new Carrera T is £11,500 more expensive than the Carrera.)
And I suppose that’s why we go on and on about the Porsche 911 – whatever sort of sports car your heart desires, there is almost certainly a 911 to suit.
