Originally Posted by MagicRat

Well here it is, and lengthy it is going to be. I drove the 991.2 for 250 miles yesterday and this morning, on pretty much every kind of road there is, and it was a great privelege to have been given such a long time in such a new car. I'm going to try to do justice to that privilege by providing my opinion in as thorough a way as possible, especially for non-European readers, who may be ordering or thinking about ordering these cars without having driven them. (A word on that: I want to give a particular shout-out to North America, and what I feel to be the predominantly North American atmosphere of this forum. There is a car forum in the UK with a Porsche section, but it is a less joyful place than this, with a lot of what feel like discussion of the price of fish. Photos of new cars are rare, as seems to be sincere well-wishing towards their buyers. I prefer Rennlist, so America, this is for you). I'd also like to thank Porsche Centre East London for lending me the car. They know how to treat people there.

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 Circular’s 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.

PS I have a bunch of other small observations about the car, that may be of interest to those buying and which I will post at some point later, but I’m a bit tired from getting all of this down. I hope that it’s been of some use. Do fire away with any questions.

Cheers,

MR

Originally Posted by Nizer

Turbos are new? Who knew?

Originally Posted by Just in time

....what is new is that NA motors are gone from Porsche.

Originally Posted by Just in time

I need Cliff notes! but the comments I saw reminded me of the old PDK v. Manual, water cooled v. Air cooled arguments Whenever Porsche comes up with something new, that breaks with "tradition, " it is deemed sacrilegious and must be put down.

Originally Posted by Nizer

He lost me after the first paragraph

Originally Posted by Nizer

He lost me after the first paragraph