... that used to make it so special. And for some reason, it's not quite so easy to fall under its spell." This quote comes directly from the following review:

A growing number of reviews are echoing similar sentiments. It seems that the CAFE standards are finally starting to take their toll.

 

Car and Driver just put the 991.2 in their latest issue and they say its better than the .1

The thing is, the turbos bring the torque that required revving the .1 car past 5K to get. People buy horsepower, but they want torque, so that low-end torque will make this car seem superior to the .1 to the vast majority of buyers. Who drives around all day over 4K rpm anyways? If you are going to stay on the wick, then the .1 would be more fun - but for daily driving these 3.0 Turbos will be hard to beat.

 

Subjective assessments are all valid to those who make them. Yawn.

 

That review does not surprise me. I think Porsche is going in the wrong direction, at least for the American market. There are things about larger, normally aspirated engines that just make them more appealing to a lot of us. I agree with what the Sheila said. I want to build the RPM's and hear and feel the explosive roar of higher RPM's unhindered by turbos. I also don't give a crap about gas mileage, or emissions for that matter compared to power and fun.

 

Well said.

 

.2 is better for a daily driver. .1 makes you intentionally work for it. It is more fun but also far less practical in a commute.

Same discussion between the E46 M3 and the 335[BMW] when it came out. The 335 "felt" faster in commuting because of the earlier power at low RPMs. This that would say its "faster" missed the point of the high revving S54. Everyone should expect the new generation to be better... The .2 will be faster but won't have the feeling of the 3.8 - ever.

 

Boom. This is exactly what I was about to say. The 335 vs. M3 convo. When the E46 and even E90/92 M3 were NA kings of their time, the 335 came in and blew people away. Stock performance was already amazing, but a single tune would yield 400+hp. All of a sudden, everyone's main squeeze in LA was a 335 and it was an "M3 killer."

It's all what you make of it. As countless people have said (and countless more will argue), the .1 (and, for that matter, NA engines) make you work for full performance and won't give you full blasts of power during your daily drive commute through downtown roads. On the other hand, the .2 (and FI engines) give you that rush of torque that so many people associate with "fun" in a car.

So, to remain as objective as I can, the NA crowd enjoys and understands that the 3.8 is a purebred performer that shines when it's pushed, and when it's at home on open roads, curves, and the track.

The FI crowd, on the other hand, either (a) understands all of the above but still *wants* pure power and torque during a daily commute, or (b) doesn't understand the above and thinks that NA engines are weak/slow.

It's your call, and every single person can put his or her own spin on the argument. But it's quite obvious that a good amount of Porsche purists and enthusiasts are not excited about the switch to turbo 3.0s in our Carreras.

 

Also - if the 3.0tt was better for the top-o-line... then why keep the 3.8NA for the GTS? It's a fun engine. If the car is a daily driver... then the 3.o is the way to go I believe.

 

I've had a PTT and a few NA 911's- they are each fun in their own right. That blast of torque in the PTT in a straight line was pretty darn cool.
But the sound of the 911 S and GTS are above the PTT.
They are both great in their own right.


2.0 liter 4 bangers in Boxsters and Caymans?? They had to put '718' on the badge to help sales.


Most Porsche cars are turbos now. 8 years from now, I have a feeling the 3.8 NA engines will be in demand.

 

I see a lot here about the engine change but I was more interested in the rear wheel steering. I have a 13 C2S. I like to drive it on the track and would be curious how any current Turbo drivers like the rear axle steering?

 

I know it is a change of topic but why do reviewers sit on cars or put their hands all over priceless classics?

 

Something I'm interested in, too. Sounds like it can be quite a treat if it works on-track. I'd love to drive Carreras back to back and feel the difference. Wonder how much it'd change my driving style on track.

 

I posted this on the other forum. Might as well put it here too in case it is of help to anyone. Had a 24hr test drive in a 991.2S, and own a 991.1 GTS. For those who want the short version, I agree with Rebecca Jackson and disagree with Car and Driver. The 991.2 is a very, very fast car if you want to thrash it; for cruising around the 991.1 (to me) felt and sounded much more special.

So. There was some thread-specific introductory stuff and then:

But the headline is that, in spite of being deeply impressed by almost all aspects of the 991.2 Carrera S, I am not going be buying one. It is a wonderfully fast and dynamic car, but simply one that I knew quite quickly once I took it on roads I knew that I would never be able to love. A lot of people will love it though, and during my time with the car I developed a theory about what it is good for, and what it is not.

I’m going to put this together in the approximate order that it happened to me, beginning with leaving the garage and heading onto the North Circular Road to go and visit Old Mother Rat. The North Circular has 3 lanes and speed limits of 40-50mph. It’s fun for a nocturnal blast but this was mid-morning, mid-traffic and boring, and that was the first thought I caught myself with: oh wow, oh no, this is *boring*. I am driving a 911 and it’s boring. What?

Sound. That’s a lot of it. The .2 is extremely quiet. At moderate speed I couldn’t hear anything under 4,000rpm, whether PSE was on or off. I’m afraid that button did so little that I had to keep checking whether or not it was broken (a homogeneity between the modes, an apparent ineffectiveness of the buttons and dial, came to be a prominent feature of my time with the car). Even when I did rev it out the overrun pops just sounded sort of sad and broken. The note sportier than a TTS but nowhere near a 991.1. Sound, though, can be fixed – Mr Akrapovic, I’m sure, is at this moment summoning his elves – power delivery can’t.

There’s no turbo-lag, in the sense that I understood it, but I think I probably misunderstood it. The throttle’s top-of-the-pedal feel is incredibly alive and better than my GTS, but the response is definitely non-linear at low revs. It’s dramatically different and will be very obvious to anyone who’s just stepped out of the previous car. There’s even a cute little boost meter on the info screen to show you when it’s happening. True, above 3,000 rpm the boost starts as soon as the pedal is pressed, so the car feels pretty similar to an NA, though immediately faster and less top-end. Any lower than 3k, though, and you get the initial acceleration and then a gentle but very firm further acceleration – there are absolutely definitely two things happening. Please don’t get me wrong, this further acceleration is delightful, and it makes the car very, very fast, but this feeling of something else pushing it along disconnected me from the car. I spent so long wondering why this was – why what is after all added speed felt so bad to me. I like going fast. My tuning guy said there’d be software before long to get the .2 to 500hp, and who wouldn’t want an RWD car with that? Well, me, it turns out. Why was this car that was so very fast, and could be made so much faster (and better sounding), leaving me so utterly cold?

Old Mother Rat felt the same way. I didn’t tell her what I was thinking, just let her get in and make her own judgment. Her first comment was ‘why doesn’t it sound like a Porsche?’. OMR’s eyesight is not what it was and sadly she is not allowed to drive anymore, but her last car was a 500hp Jaguar XKR, and she was very competent at handling my dad’s H-gate Ferrari back in the 90s. “Is this what sports cars have to be like now?” she asked, “It’s sad. This feels like a very fast runaround, like something for going to the shops.” The worst thing was that she was wrong. I go to the shops in the GTS and it’s an event. Even though I barely go over 30mph and most of the way has speed bumps, I look forward to and then enjoy the journey. In spite of .2’s the lovely rear-axle steering (if you are buying this car, I’d say it’s a must-have) I knew I wouldn’t look forward to pottering about in it in anything like the same way. Again it’s the sound, and that intangible something about the power delivery.

So then I hit the motorway, which suited the .2 beautifully. In the GTS I have the car in auto and change gear with the gas, knocking it down usually to 5th when I want to overtake. In the .2 I stayed in the elastic 7th, enjoying the little pause and then the slingshot of graceful overtaking power. Also, Porsche seem to have really sorted the coasting function in this car. In mine it drives me nuts and I turn it off for motorway auto mode, here it’s seamless and one almost has to look at the rev counter to tell if the engine is engaged or not. All the start/stop stuff is better integrated in the .2. On the motorway and in town that’s kind of nice. If you’re someone who turns it off as soon as they get into the car, though, obviously it’s not a big selling point, and the question has to be asked how great a hardship changing to 5th really is.

And so to the country roads, specifically a great twisty bit I know well and love dearly. It’s a derestricted (60mph, and cops might be more lenient if you’re a shade over) with long straights, a couple of sweepers, and lots of nadgery stuff. And I went down it fast, given that it was wet, and with the torque blasting me down the straights it was fun (I do think the .2 would have shown its talents better in the dry, as I couldn’t really get the shove on out of the corners). I kept thinking while I was driving of how I was going to describe the experience in this review, and when I got to the end of the road realised two things. 1) I wasn’t sweating; in the GTS I usually am. 2) In the GTS there’s no way I would or could have been thinking about how I was going to describe anything to anybody. I wouldn’t have been able to think of anything other than Information, Position, Speed, Gear, Acceleration over and over again while occasionally screaming with joy. My time down the road in the older car (not that I would ever time myself on a public road) might well have been slower, but just in some intangible way better spent.

After a few more hours of rural fun I headed back to London up the A24 (dual carriageway, dark, commuters, roundabouts). I was tired and just wanted to get back, in time to get some dinner, have a rest and then take a petrolhead friend for a late-night spin. And just when I wasn’t expecting it, just when I wasn’t so in the mood for driving anymore, the car came absolutely and inexorably alive. I destroyed the A24. I butchered it. Overtakes on straights, overtakes on bends – once getting home was the goal the car was in its element like no four-wheeled thing I’ve ever experienced. If you like sports cars and commute long-distance then this is the one for you.

But then I was back in London traffic again, barely moving, and bored once again. But we’re always bored in traffic, right? Well, yes and no. Shortly after the Christmas we’ve just had, Mrs Rat and I were driving back from her mother’s place in Yorkshire on the M1. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, the M1 is England’s ageing spine, riddled with average-speed cameras and peopled by tailgaters and the wilfully blind. It took us 7 hours in stop-start traffic to get home and it was only by hour 6, with Mrs Rat hungry and fractious, that I started to do anything other than basically just really enjoy driving the car. 6 hours, in traffic, just listening to it and feeling it respond (OK the Burmester and Mrs Rat’s company helped). Similarly, I drove to Porsche East London in the early morning twice this week, once to drop off the GTS and once to pick it up. The journey in the .2 was quick and pleasant, with a couple of good fast wriggles of the rear end that made me grin. The same journey at the same time of day with the .1 was memorable – it felt like the car was not my mere vehicle, nor my deadly weapon, but my companion. When I got home, by the way, I had dinner and then cancelled the trip to see my friend. I just couldn’t be bothered driving anymore. By contrast I have driven an entire needless lap of the North and South Circulars at night in the GTS, just to visit Old Mother Rat.

The difference in my basic enjoyment of the two cars surprised me so, so much. I am a sane person. I know that cars are not alive. So what’s going on? It can’t just be the sound. I refuse to believe that just turning up the volume on the .2 would make me love it, and so it seems to come back to the question of boost, and what it is about the boost that makes me like this car so much less. I think it hinges upon that old thorny branch called ‘character’ and what ‘character’ means, when one is talking about a thing that isn’t alive. Let’s think about this. My GTS’s behaviour depends simply on how many rpm it is doing; it has a character that slides smoothly and predictably from persuasive to demonic. This means the rev counter is a direct window into its soul. Porsche place it in the middle, because they know. But the .2’s character is a product of both revs and boost (not just how fast the engine is going, but that and how long it has been under acceleration for). This means that while the car is not unpredictable per se, it is in an important sense unknowable. We can drive it on feel, but as one reviewer said “the rev counter could have turned into a clock”. Because it does not directly tell us how the car is going to respond, the window to the its soul is closed.

What, though, of my BMW 1200GS? The rev counter could be a clock on that too, and I adore the massive, weird beast. I think the point is that a big-twin adventure tourer like that is designed to pull in high gear at low revs – it’s a tremendous pleasure to short shift it and feel the individual cylinders banging away while one’s arms get pulled from their sockets, and at high revs it sounds less good than at low. The 991.2 has torque at the low end, but sound only at the high (maybe with a full Akra system like my bike has this would be solved), but it would still have that essential unknowability, caused by the intervention of the boost, which would always separate me from the car.

And this separation maybe seems to be the point. There was an editorial in The Economist recently about CEOs who read emails while running on a treadmill and listening to the news. TE was pretty scathing, but it acknowledged that this is what life is like for a lot of successful people now, and it tends to be successful people who buy Porsches. And I don’t know or care what Apple CarPlay is, but it sounds like something that would be important people whose lives are quite different from my own. I think the whole 991.2 has been designed for people who are not like me.

Which means you need to know who I am before you decide whether to listen to me. I’m a peaceful sort of bloke. I don’t floor it off the lights, or not very often. I think test cricket is a great day out. I meditate, when I remember to. I spent many years playing and then coaching competitive sport, which may be related to why I now have little interest in competing with other cars on road or track. In fact I’m not much of a track person in general. I work from home, and if I need to get anywhere in a hurry will always take the bike. I would probably count as an advanced driver in terms of roadcraft and think I’m reasonably progressive, but I know I have an immense amount to learn and plan to learn as much of it as I can. I don’t have the skill or the stones to unstick the car more than the tiniest bit. I want driving to feel special at legal speeds.

You may not be like me. To the competitive souls who hate being overtaken, to the person who has a long way to go and in a hurry each day, to those who drive and need or like to think about other things, and to the ones who just wish for the newest and fastest thing – as long as you stay safe you have only my respect and good wishes. If getting from A to B as fast as possible is your thing then the 991.2 is the best decision that you will ever make.

But if you think that there’s a chance you are like me… If you drive around for 3 hours on a Sunday morning just because you can; if you smell a bit after you do so and think that that’s as it should be; if the getting there sometimes matters more than the place you’re getting; or if you have thought or fantasised about owning or driving a sports car ever since you can remember being conscious, then I am going to suggest that you now think very, very hard. If you have ordered or are planning to order this car, just look at your options. Test drive a used GTS, or even an S (you can more or less turn an S into a GTS on the aftermarket with a few $£ if you want to). Or if you’ve got a 911.1 and it’s had a good innings and you’re a bit bored with it then consider giving it some love – an exhaust, a tune. Trade PDK for stick, coupe for cab, whatever. It’s human nature to want the next thing, but while the 991.2 is no doubt a huge step forward, it also a giant leap sideways, and one which is never going to be un-made. Even a lost deposit and a used car is less money than a new one, and if I had traded in my .1 GTS for a .2 then I think I wouldn’t have made it home. I’d be pulled over on the shoulder, f***ing weeping for what I had lost.

So I’m sorry if that’s not what people wanted to hear, and really please listen only if the things I’ve said seem to speak to your nature. The 991.2 is a fantastic car – doing more with less than what came before it – but I’m looking out of my window at the last of the dinosaurs, and I want it to be mine for as long as I live.


***

That's the end of it. I made another post after that, below:


I reckon my thoughts on the 991.2 will have confirmed, rather than changed, people's opinions. We're probably not the youngest crowd on the internet, so we have probably acquired a little bit of self-knowledge over the years. I think those who are going to like the .2 probably on some level always knew they were going to like it, and those who aren't knew they wouldn't. I bought the GTS when I did because I suspected, having driven a TTS round Silverstone, that turbos weren't for me. I was right. Those who didn't buy a TTS only because they didn't fancy its drivetrain, diameter or price point can now get the car they want.

Porsche's sports range feels smoothed out now, or will do when the 718s come out. All FI, in increasing order of acceleration.

718
718S
Carrera
Carrera 4
Carrera S
Carrera 4S
Turbo
Turbo S

You have to admit it's neat. The GT cars have their own side column. I do hope people will still drive them and not just use them as, pardon the pun, investment vehicles.

Anyway, here, in no particular order, are some other bits and pieces about the 991.2:

The reversed direction on the PDK manual mode is great. I'm used to it being backwards, and it took me a while to rewire my brain, but once I did I found myself using the stick to shift more than the paddles. I am going to see if mine can be rewired. Presumably possible?

I didn't get on with the spiffy new steering wheel quite as well as I thought I would. The car I drove had heated multifunction, but not GT sport, and I found I couldn't hook my thumbs over the place where the thumbs go (automotive vocabulary fail) quite as well as on my MF wheel. The best wheel for this is the .1 sportdesign, I think because of its thinness. I get a really good hook onto that. Then again, maybe I just have short thumbs. Will let the group know if I get to hold a GT Sport wheel anytime soon.

On the subject of steering wheels, they've moved the heating button so it doesn't stick out. I switched it on by accident during a spirited bit and got to the end of the road wondering why my hands were scalding, before taking ages to find the thing to turn it off. Sure it will be easy to avoid once one knows where it is, though.

The windscreen wipers' fastest setting doesn't seem to be available in auto (rain-sense) anymore. I got caught in a proper dial-Noah rainstorm and they kept swishing back and forth in their same leisurely way, meaning I had to push the stalk upwards. This is, I think, the most minor and first-world problem I have ever spoken or written about, but I like the set-and-forget nature of my current wipers, and can't think why they would have changed it. Maybe it was just a fault in that particular car.

To another first-world thing, much has been made of the new PCM system. My salesman, who otherwise seems like a pretty decent human being, got into the car on my first test drive, pointed at the screen and said. “This. It’s all about this.” Once I’d told him that I didn’t mind about “that” he didn’t mention it again, but I did have a bit of a look and a play with it when I had the car for longer. While the old screen was recessed, the new one is flush. While this looks nice and modern and iphone-ish, because it’s the same size as the old one, it’s now got a black border around it that doesn’t serve a purpose, so now the screen looks a bit small, which seems like a misstep in our world of ever increasing screens.

It is much more beautiful, though – textures, rolling hills etc. But got me wondering, though, how beautiful do I want my satnav’s screen to be? I certainly want the inside of my car to look nice, but ultimately if you’ve got a satnav that looks like a Rembrandt you are going to look at it more, which means you you'll look at the road less, which means you’ll crash. The same seems to go for having more functionality in general. Mrs Rat’s Mini Cooper has an absolutely byzantine infotainment system which not even she can work (and she is somewhat younger than I am and much more technically wizardly). She uses directions, music and hands-free phone and that’s it. Maybe there are people who want to look up, on their car system, directions to the best pizza joint in town and then be taken there, but I have never met any of them. If I’m driving to a place, I look it up beforehand in my house, and then I put it into the satnav, which takes me there. Saying that, my PCMs calculation of journey times is so psychopathically optimistic and the traffic information so inaccurate and random that a change would be nice but (sorry, sorry) I didn’t actually put a journey into the new system and see if it was any better because I knew where I was going all the time. It must be better. It can't be worse. But on the other hand Waze is definitely better, and free, and you can just pay 15 quid for a windscreen phone mount and get completely accurate traffic stuff from that.

And then I did get back into the old GTS and found I preferred the simpler, cleaner look of that map, and started again about functionality. A satnav provides information, like a road sign. We don’t have the speed limits in 3D letters, suddenly, just because we can – they look the same as they have looked for years, because that was judged by someone smart to be the clearest way to get information to people. So I think satnavs should be prettier only if they are also clearer and information can be gleaned from them more quickly.

Other things other things... PDK has gained some IQ points. Sometimes I will manually downshift into second at the same time as the car decides it wants to do it automatically and end up, lurchingly, in first. The new one doesn't do that, maybe just due to different auto shift points on the new engine.

Oh yeah, there is no kick down! Yup, pedal on floor means pedal on floor. Floor it in auto mode and it still shifts down of course, but manual now means manual. You can press the accelerator as hard as you like and you will stay in the same gear. The boost button or whatever it is only works in auto mode though, and puts the car into sport-plus mode and as low a gear as possible for 20 seconds. I used it once. It felt kind of the same as flooring the gas.

Modes in general I think affect just boost. In mine, the pedal feel is quite different depending on mode, but here it's super responsive at the top all the time but the boost comes in more quickly in sport and more again in sport+. I found the difference to be extremely subtle, but then again I'm inexperienced at driving turbo engines so might just have been feeling for the wrong things.

Umm, I think the PDLS+ main beam has become more conservative. I suspect mine blinds people and I don't use it much. This one seemed to be dipped more often.

***

That's it. Hope it's helpful!

 

One of the best reviews of 991.2 I've ever come across. You covey your feelings transparently and everything made a lot of sense. I'm definitely in the same category of car guys like you and there's something about the 'soul' or as you call it 'character' that's generally missing in a turbo car...not 100% predictability on engine behavior being the key.

Among the 'pros' of the car, rear wheel steering is definitely something that I'd want to have but I always thought, why you need it in a sports car? Made more sense to me in bigger vehicles...

Very well written. Thanks for sharing.

 

Fantastic review. Thanks for sharing it.