simsgw

Okay, Just to be clear.
This:

is not:


A fellow graduate geek describes the 991 generation as "an inflection point in Porsche history." Other geeks will get that without translation, but for real people I shall re-state it as "they took a new direction with this model." I have been a Porsche lover -- or at least luster -- since 1965, but I've only been a Porsche owner since 2009, so I'm not equipped for model nostalgia. I'm really not, but his words came to mind when I went out to my hotel parking lot and discovered this neighbor. Admitting my own inadequacy, I still cannot agree with my friend.

Once again:
Grandpa:

Scion of that fine old family:

They are different. Can we agree on that? Fair enough, but a new direction... well, I don't buy it. Let's look at it another way.

Remember Uncle Fred? Sweet old guy, except for pinching your arm once in a while. And he always told this same joke. The first time you understood the punch line at nine years old, you giggled for days and repeated it to all your friends. At ten, you chuckled. By eighteen, it was a nostalgic reminder of your childhood, but when Uncle Fred wanted to tell that joke to your newly betrothed love, you fled.

Handling quirks are like that. Your grandpa’s Porsche has several eccentricities that will make you chuckle -- maybe even giggle -- the first few times. After forty years... well, they get old. A punch line is funny because it’s unexpected, like the early 911 nose bobbing in the middle of corners. The bobbing nose continues to some extent right up through the 997. A different friend reported that his 997 would bob along, and was curious whether a suspension adjustment would stop it. I had to explain it was an old joke that hadn't completed fading away.

It must be confessed that finally...
No bobble: Bobble:

Stuttgart has abandoned the bobble.

That certainly is change, and we can always debate the value of change, but that's what design engineers do. We invent new things. Usually new kids in the same family, but still new. Personally, I've heard that old joke long enough that I don't miss it, and I don't really think that shedding it and a few other eccentricities makes this a new direction for Porsche.

This 991 generation may eventually be considered eccentric for the way its top takes a whole thirteen seconds to go up and down, or the quaint use of animal hide to cover the seats, or even for its having a delightful exhaust sound that doesn’t come from the stereo speakers. But time and our grandkids will have to pick new eccentricities to identify this generation. The nose doesn’t bob and the car doesn’t turn around backward if you hesitate going into a corner. This ain’t your grandpa’s Porsche.

We’ve settled that, right? Good. Now with modern standards of comparison, let’s consider four cars I drove recently: Panamera S with the V-8, 991S Cab, 991S Coupe with AWD, 991S Coupe with AWD and dynamic chassis control. More crisply: the Pannie S, C2S Cab, C4S, and C4S with PDCC. Auto Gallery Porsche in Woodland Hills, California sold me that C2S and let me drive their Panamera S for a couple of weeks and the C4S for an afternoon. They had no PDCC cars on hand, but McKenna Porsche in Norwalk California did, and they loaned me one long enough to find the differences.

No nasty habits in the bunch, and not really anything we would call eccentricities. Our grandkids may spot things, but for now, these are simply four of the world’s best cars for covering distance on entertaining roads. They stitch together straights with curves of varying radius, flicks around chuckholes, and giggle-inducing dips. They let you gasp at a wet spot mid-corner so you can laugh when they whip past without drama. These all are very nice cars that will put to shame any sports car and even the exotics of your grandpa’s heyday.

I have driven the Pannie and the C2S on tracks as well as 'entertaining' public roads. It wasn’t convenient, so I didn’t bother arranging track time for the C4 models. We’ve all read the reports and know they keep up the family reputation on race tracks.

One more time, because I'm about to distinguish them, and I don't want the differences sounding like objections: Cars don’t come any better than these four at a dozen years into the 21st century. Different yes, but in this rarified class, better/worse are completely subjective terms and related completely to personal preference. This isn't Car & Driver and I don't need to make you feel like your Subaru is a match for these flawed geniusmobiles. It isn't, and they ain't flawed. Not in any meaningful sense. They certainly differ and we quibble about details as if they matter, but these are all great cars. Keep the Subaru for hauling the dog to the vet.

Every car design has its own personality and there are … maybe half a dozen others that deserve to spoken of in the same discussion with these four. But none of the others is better than these. Different personality to a Ferrari 458 or a Lamborghini Gallardo, both of which I considered at Auto Gallery, but not better. Just different. And if you prefer the Ferrari feel or suffer Lambo lust, then you already know that, so why are you wasting time reading about Porsches? Go drive somewhere!

Okay, have they left? Fine. Let's talk about differences. Ultimate performance? Well, sure. Sorta. I mean it depends on your performance metric, doesn't it? If passenger joy per mile per minute is your criterion, find three friends and grab the Pannie. I had my loaner on Buttonwillow race track and a friend who usually hates riding with fast drivers can't quit talking about the good time she had in the right seat of that Pannie. Performance along that metric isn't about absolute g-loads. It's about smooth transitions through the esses and a solid feel in that strange off-camber hump along the back straight. On this metric, I'd put the Pannie hauling three friends up against any car in the world. This is really about Carreras, and I only include the Pannie to illustrate a technical point we'll need in a moment. Let's stick with the sports/touring category where our Carreras live. We'll just refer to the Pannie for a baseline.

Don't cringe though. That baseline is quite good even along the sports/touring car spectrum. I told of going on a canyon tour and being put behind the lead 914 so I wouldn't fall behind the Turbos and Carreras and embarrass myself. In fact, following that super-light roadster through the mountains was routine for the Pannie. These are fear-limited roads. Only the default state speed limit applies, but nearly every corner is marked with a yellow caution advising 20 or 30 mph. I began by not braking unless the 914 did, just to see if the Pannie could keep up. In fifteen minutes, I was making a game of not braking even when the 914 did, just to see how far the Pannie could go. The answer is a long damn way. As I said, not your grandpa's Porsche.

All four of these modern cars handle beyond grandpa's dreams. (Mind you, that 914 driver refers to a Pannie as an aluminum avalanche after a day spent watching it in his mirrors as it ate him up in corners.) Off topic? Not really. What I'm saying is I could take a Panamera S from Berlin to Milan across the Alps as fast as any car in this comparison with three friends on board. That is the standard Herr Doktor Porsche had in mind. He didn't have as many friends of course. Aboard I mean.

The Carreras just add joy to that trip. More joy per mile per front seat. They are fun to drive, darn it. The Pannie isn't work exactly, but it needs an understanding hand at the wheel. And of course, being sports/touring cars, the Carreras can lay down a monster lap time on race tracks in dead-stock form if you're inclined that way. The Pannie is fairly quick, but not in the same class -- figuratively as well as literally. With all that said, with all those similarities, I could get in one of these cars blindfolded and tell you which one it was within a mile. At least if it was a sufficiently twisty mile. And hopefully without the blindfold after I buckle up.

• 2WD versus 4WD
  I have to plead more of that model ignorance. The only four-wheel-drive Porsches I had driven until Friday last were the Turbos, and of course we don't have a 991 Turbo to compare. I declined a 997 Turbo S after testing it in November. When I say how much better I like the 991 C4S, that includes a lot of other model differences besides the AWD upgrade. (If it's part of the inflection, I love it.) Turbos feel... well, everybody says 'planted' and I suppose I have to agree, with the footnote that so is the Mexican Palm outside my office window. Planted, I mean.
  
  I expected something like that elephantine grip on the road with the 991 C4S and I was delighted to be wrong. The other popular assertion is that AWD pulls you through corners. That's hogwash. Try tracking a front-wheel-drive car if you believe that myth. It's like driving a chariot pulling a house trailer with those front wheels trying to do everything. What I can detect is the difference in front-end mass. That extra 150 lb of drive hardware affects the polar moment, if you'll forgive a geekism. It doesn't cause understeer, but I might describe it as being less eager to oversteer than a C2S. You can't flick it sideways because it doesn't play that game. It just moves over promptly and precisely. In fact, if you respect the rhythm of the C4S, that front download improves the grip and lets it turn in crisply in situations where a Carrera needs a touch of brakes to front load it momentarily so it will start rotating easily. (Balance braking, we call that. Not to slow the car, just to transfer some load for a moment so we have the grip where we want it.) Differences, remember. Not objections. After the C4S drive, I said sincerely "I'd buy it this minute if I didn't already have a Carrera two months old."
  
• 'Simple' PASM versus Dynamic Chassis Control
  I'd like to say pithy things about PASM versus the full-analog chassis of a 3.4 Coupe, but the last analog suspension Carrera I drove was a 997.1 with the sport suspension. All I really remember was being happy when they showed us a car we could tolerate: the PASM Coupe. PASM is so good, it amounted to a buy/no-buy decision factor in the 997 generation. I wish I could update that for the 991 standard suspension, but I haven't had the chance.
  The Cayman/Boxster chassis is sufficiently different that no direct comparison is useful. So let's stick to comparing the PASM/PTV to the next step up in computer-aided suspension: the PDCC. I... boy, this needs a technical digression. Quick version: They both work great. PDCC works better. Anecdotal version: Rolling down a strange boulevard asking the ride-along salesman about local roads that have not been re-paved recently so we can try the PDCC in extremis. Only 40 mph of course. This is a straight-laced city we're traversing. Suddenly the car ahead clears an obstacle: a bloody speed bump! I've never seen one on a boulevard. They're for residential areas! The PDCC car took it in stride. Mind you, my C2S would not have banged the nose, though I'm pretty sure my 997 would have. But the PDCC car swallowed the jolt with ease. Very impressive. PASM is already impressive in crossing modern nastiness like this. PDCC is better. Just saying.

Now for the technical distinctions that make any one of these cars recognizable in a heartbeat. Well, a mile's worth of heartbeats anyway.

Rhythm and grace. I tell my students to take a lap to feel the rhythm of their car. To drive with their fingertips and learn how quickly it likes to transition from brake to power and back to braking; how readily it changes from left loading to right loading; and how it handles combinations of those transitions. Those rhythms are a lot of what we're feeling when we speak of the handling 'personality' of a car. A quick lap is dancing with a partner. A very quick lap is like dancing on a hardwood floor in leather soles compared to sneakers on asphalt. A fast car turning TTOD seems to flow on everted rubber from apex to apex.

Simple comparisons.

• Panamera versus Carreras - Stately versus Nimble. Not slow, just stately. Driving fast, you must let a Panamera take its time rolling into corners and on the transitions between corners when they come close together. It doesn't trip on its own feet, but it isn't happy if you try to rush things. No car is, but the difference in natural rhythm from a Pannie to a Carrera is dramatic. Like a 747. Dignified majesty on the taxiway, but it will be going 600 mph before that joyful little taildragger clears the control zone. Lots of mass, and you feel it resisting if you try to hurry the transitions, but quick.
• C2S to C4S - They both dance, but... the C2S bounds around happily. Let's suppose nineteen hypothetical Porsches are getting on a freeway in some city far far away. They intend a quick run to some mountain road four exits away. Accelerating up the on-ramp like a multi-million-dollar train with JATO assist, here they come. The fifth car, hypothetically a C2S, encounters a numb driver that chooses to make a lane change into the midst of this train moving at ... let's say 70, just to have a number. And the fellow with low attention span moves right without "checking six" while going 50 mph. The stout fellow in the C2S has to move left one lane, continue a hundred yards, and move back into the right lane to rejoin the train. Clear?
  
  Okay, that hypothetical C2S driver would find himself flicking the car left, which causes weight transfer onto the right side. Then he catches the movement after only twelve feet (one standard lane width), and that transfers the weight back to the left side. Uncorrected, that weight transfer to the left side causes a car to move back in the direction it came. As if it rebounds from the new position. It will move back to the right in this example. So it goes: flick, catch, correct. 100 yards or roughly three seconds, then flick right, catch, and correct. The C4S dances less. Just as nimble, but the correct is sotto voce. If a C2S goes FLICK/CATCH/CORRECT, the C4S goes FLICK/CATCH/correct. That extra polar moment mutes the effect.
  

In electronics, we call that effect 'ringing'. A signal rises to a target level, overshoots slightly, returns with some undershoot, corrects back with a lesser overshoot and so on. The 'dampers' in old fashioned car language are named for their ability to damp that effect in mechanical systems. A good sports car is not damped into being stolid. That's why I say these cars dance. They love doing such moves, but the way they differ is in the frequency of their response. Faster electronic circuits 'ring' at a higher frequency and damp it faster. The analogy isn't worth critiquing and isn't complete, but in those rough terms:

These cars progress from the Pannie with its stately moves, up through the C2S to the C4S and the C4S/PDCC. The last example was the most crisp, the most satisfying of the bunch. I actually thought the word 'squishy' when I first got back into my own C2S. I had to get off the freeway and find a canyon road to remind myself how wonderful all those rhythms work together in my C2S. I like bounding happiness as much as I like a crisp scalpel cutting a apex, but I needed that reassurance. Because the difference is night and day -- if you're already an alert driver of cars in this class -- and the PDCC car is a delight to drive.

I didn't expect that. I did not. Given the history of dynamic chassis stabilizing techniques, I expected the PDCC car to show odd side-effects of being over-stabilized when pushed into those quick maneuvers. Maybe a lateral rhythm out of sync with the longitudinal one, like an empty C-130. I expected a car that would reassure novices, but annoy ... well, me and other very experienced drivers who like to dance with the right car. I guess I expected it to mutter "Dance? I don't dance. I just progress. Smoothly. Want to see me glide?" Like getting out of a Formula Ford and into an air cushion vehicle. Not so. Not at all.

The real inflection in Porsche engineering has been the move from analog to digital control, and it shows superbly in the PDCC car. They took a technology that annoyed the hell out of drivers thirty years ago and used modern high-speed processors to bring it up to their standard. A traditionalist will object they just "programmed a virtual sports car" and we justly criticize the Nissan GTR for a synthetic feeling that comes from that mistake. But Porsche seem to be smarter, or maybe just more experienced at this art of the sports car. Obviously, we 'program' traditional analog suspension all the time. That isn't the sin here. We call it "setting up" a race car and manufacturers do it before releasing a new model and enthusiasts try to second guess their judgment. This is just digital set up, and Porsche knows how to set up a sports car. They've done a very natural, very successful, job of it with the PDCC Carrera. It is a Porsche -- okay, without the bobbing that made Grandpa giggle -- but definitely a Porsche.

I can't find the thread, but I remember a couple of months ago admitting grudgingly that PDCC might be "reassuring to novices" or something surly like that. Afterward, I felt it wasn't fair to criticize without having tried one myself. That's why I went to some trouble to find a PDCC car and I'm sure glad McKenna Porsche was gracious enough to lend it to me, knowing I already had chosen my own 991, so I wasn't in need of another.

There is no 'ponderous' feel to this generation of C4S cars; there is no 'synthetic' feel to the PDCC Carrera; and...

This certainly ain't your grandpa's Porsche:


Gary

Mike in CA

Thanks, Gary, for taking the time to share your experience (great fun, I'm sure) and your expert analysis. It was all great, but I was particularly intrigued by your comments regarding PDCC. I've been extremely happy with it in my Cayenne but was concerned that while it was appropriate to an SUV it might not make the transiition to a Carrera gracefully. I'll have to find a PDCC 991 of my own to test drive but your comments definitely have me considering it as a possibility if I get that 991 GT3. Well done!

oldman40

fantastic post, gary, thank you. it sounds like porsche really got the 4s agility just right in the 991 compared to previous models. i wonder if you think the power assisted steering might also be part of the magical equation with the awd version? also, it would have been interesting to see a c2s with pdcc in the mix, but perhaps that could be part of another chapter!

btw your 991 looks fantastic with the brown top. looks a lot like the 'exclusive' 991 cab on the corporate website.

Rainier_991

Thanks Gary,
excellent writeup and thanks for your precious time donated to educate the great unwashed masses !

Now tell your Porsche dealer to give you some of the other models to try out...

Rainier

bernpep

Well done Gary! So would you really opt for the 4s over yours if you bought again?

chuckbdc

Thanks Gary. Hard work all of that, but somebody has to do it!

Now that the beneficial effects of having digital intelligence dynamically applied to suspension geometry are confirmed emphatically (which I accept as empirical validation given the source), the PDCC issue is resolved. I will forever think of Sport PASM as being just "less squishy".

DBYT

Thanks for the excellent post. Really enjoy your insights and analogies.

rpilot

... And this is why rennlist is a classy place. Thank You.

PS: I still wish you will have an opportunity to weigh in on the PASM vs no PASM, if for no other reason to give myself an idea of how similar or different my perception / take on it is tha yours. Also like you mentioned your comparison was in a 997S, whereas now you would need a 3.4 to compare against a 3.4 PASM or a 3.8 PASM to get a real idea since the springs by default are firmer in an S (and maybe 3.4 with PASM) than in a base car and the S comes standard with PASM.

Hammer911

Gary- Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and impressions with us! I am sure you have provided lots of fuel for discussion!
As I am anxiously awaiting delivery of my new C4S (with PDCC), I am certainly pleased to hear your positive assessment of the vehicle...particularly coming from someone with the skills and background to fully understand and appreciate the technology and its effects.

In any case, I am sure I will enjoy my new car no matter what. C2, C2S, C4, C4S... not a bad choice in the bunch!

Bob

John 996 TT Cab

In comparing the two pictures of today's cab and the prior version (which was 1986 or later - '86 was first with engine lid mounted brake light) and calling the old one my grandfather's Porsche I am a little offended. I have a 991S Cab coming that was due for final producion last Friday. I also had a 1983 911SC Cab (first in Canada) and a 1986 Carrerra Cab. Both ordered new. Neither were my grandfather's car as he passed away in 1930. I am proud to have had my Porsche models grow and mature (while I've grown I'm seldom accused of being mature) since my first one in 1972 (which interestingly enough cost 1/20th of the new. I must be my grandfather in this situation and this confuses me.

John 996 TT Cab

xx

fbroen

Thank you for an excellently written, colorful, technologically superb description. I have not read a more insightful and enjoyable article on a 991 -- and I have read a lot (all?) of them.

As an aside, I am sitting next to my better half watching a great Australian Open match, and she finally asked what I was doing with my nose buried in the phone. My response was "I am reading a single post that has blown away any automotive journalist's writeup on a number of issues I have great interest in."

rpilot

Gary, I wanted to really compliment you on this article besides a simple thank you but was buried in work so I think I will just +1 this. I could not have come up with better words to describe your journalism.

cksuen

Great Article, Gary! As always, very detailed and insightful.

Do the cars tested have regular PASM or Sport PASM?

pfan

44 years of not submitting to the lust? I just checked the Guinness Book of records, and you, sir, are the new record holder! (Previous holder was able to hold out for an incredible 4 years, 7 months).