I think it is. I recently replaced my old daily driver Lexus with a 2015 M4. It is of course a tt 6 cylinder, I guess a poorer version of the Porsche tt. While coldly efficient and I think very fast, the passion is partly gone as is the connectivity to the road that I see in my much lighter but relatively 'underpowered' 355 hp 997.1 C2S. I was amazed in the C and D Lightning Lap issue, the BMW bested the previous M3 by a whopping 4.7 sec/lap and tied the lap time of a 2006 Ford GT. Its hard to see how sports car companies are not going to nove forward with turbo technology.I'm waiting to replace my P car with a GTS, maybe the swan song of the normally aspirated 991s. We should turn this into a poll if anyone knows how to do it
Jim

 

not long to wait, launch in Nov! tick tick tick

 

I think I would just make the 997.1 the DD

 

+1

 

Like any other engineering decision, it comes down to the trade-offs. With pollution and gas mileage becoming major regulatory and economic constraints, delivering significant power with a normally aspirated engine within those constraints becomes problematic.

That aside, I have to say that the torque a turbo charged motor provides is, to me, worth the loss of sound and high revs. And the way Porsche does it certainly mitigates almost all of the lag, making the thrust accessible and manageable.

My previous car was Z4 with a turbocharged 3L straight six. The performance of that engine was one of the things that led me to chose the TTS - the grunt of a much larger engine, but the buttery smoothness of a non-V 6.

 

Turbo is the future, like it or not. Both Macans available in the US are Turbos, and the racing engines we see Porsche developing seem to be smaller displacement turbo-charged engines.

In terms of connectivity to the road, doesn't all that feel really come from suspension and steering and tires?

In any case, while it may sound too subjective, I do think the one constant is that every new version of a car that Porsche brings out is "better" than the last.

 

If Porsche can tune a FI engine the way Ferrari has done with the California T using (what Ferrari calls) the Variable Boost Management system to limit torque at the low end so that it can replicate a linear throttle response a la NA engines, then I'm good with it.

Having had an afternoon behind the seat of a California T, I will say that it was the most NA-like turbo engine I've ever driven.

 

To preach a bit to the choir, one of the problems with turbo engines is throttle response - or more correctly, the lack of it we call "turbo lag". Turbo motors are getting VERY good with the most up to date designs, but still there is a minute perceptible lag when compared to a NA engine. Most people (at least non-enthusiasts) don't notice the lag nowadays, as they become used to the massive spread of torque these motors now produce.

The ability to provide excellent torque, good top end power, and reasonable fuel economy when compared to a NA engine of similar power is why manufacturers are making the switch.

 

I don't have a problem with it as long as they keep all variants of the 911 a flat 6. A 1.99L turbo that bested the current 3.4 all throughout the range and had better mileage would be cool, particularly if it was lighter. A 911 needs to be a couple hundred pounds lighter to truly unleash it's potential. A proper turbo could help make a great car even better.

 

A lot of it, yes. But any time we go to speed up or slow down then a lot of it comes from how responsive brakes and throttle feel. This is a big part of the reason why hydraulic transmissions are such an abomination compared to PDK or even a menial single clutch transmission. Its why the 991 responds like a sedan in Normal, feels like a sports car in Sport and a track tool in Sport Plus. Throttle response is a big deal.

That said, turbo lag today is less than what we were happy to get from a lot of normally aspirated motors not all that long ago, and a nice big fat torque curve is to die for. Turbo S's for the masses? Lot worse things could happen.

 

It just occurred to me, the throttle mapping used in all these cars has so much lag built in now already that simply by changing throttle mapping they could give any turbo, if they wanted, the same snappy throttle response equal to a GT3.

 

might be worth investing in one of those dongles (cant recall the name) that changes the mapping (by piggybacking it onto the e-gas pedal) to see what its like?

 

isnt this what Variable Turbine Geometry does on the FA engines?

 

There was a guy here tried one earlier this year. Did improve response, made Normal feel like Sport. One problem, it doesn't really change mapping, it only makes existing mapping think the pedal's moving twice (or whatever) as many degrees as it actually moved. So it gets to a point where the throttle is wide open but the pedal still has range of travel.

The mapping Porsche uses is a lot more sophisticated than that. For starters its not linear. Its more like steering, where the same steering input just off center turns the wheels initially less, then increasingly more as you keep turning. Otherwise there'd be a lot more tire chirping going on. Which some people think is a bad thing. (I know. Me too. But they do.) Then it filters out tiny fast little throttle changes, because...it'll save gas. So they rob the car of its life blood to save a few fractional mpg's.

Anyway that's all perfectly understandably corporate. What gets me is the total lack of hacks being developed to get around all this stuff. I mean, half the people buying these things are developers, IT, whatever. Steering, throttle, tunable ECU- there should by now be downloads to make your car feel just like a GT3. Instead we got the dongle. What's the deal?

 

Being a s/w developer with over 30+ years (but not in the automotive/embedded space) I believe the issue is really that there is every incentive for the 'platform' developers (Bosch, Siemens etc) to make it as
hard as possible for 3rd party developers to 'hack' their h/w & s/w.

In fact I believe that the latest generation of ECUs in the 991's are proving extremely hard to 'crack', with a variety of security measures both in h/w and s/w to either prevent or subsequently detect modifications to the f/w within
these systems making them effectively tamperproof, at least from the perspective of legitimate 3rd party vendors who want to develop products that will function legitimately in these environments.

The 'open source' movement has not yet (nor probably ever will) meet with the world of automotive electronics.

Its even harder now to develop piggyback systems that you can plug in between components in a modern car, since many are now completely digital over a CAN ... so there is no room for analog signal modification by piggybacking.