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As you can see from the title, I recently completed a cross country road trip with my wife in our 2012.5 991 911. Base Carrera with PDK, 20 inch S wheels, 14 way seats, Multi-function steering wheel, and a few other inconsequential options. Got it used almost three years ago and love it.
Our Total Trip Data page shows we spent just over 85 hours in the car over a period of 23 days. We drove from the Des Moines area of Iowa to Phoenix, with several days of around town driving, then to the Tahoe City area of Lake Tahoe, down the hill to Sacramento, CA where we both lived for years, with a side trip to the Bay area, up to Salem, Oregon (noisiest roads of the entire trip! More later), and then on home back to Iowa via US 90 and a stop at Mt. Rushmore.
When you spend that much time in a car in that short a period of time you learn a lot more about the car than you do on little weekend jaunt of a 100 or 200 miles with your friendly Porsche club. Things that don’t really become all that apparent on a two or three hour drive become real apparent on an 85 hour drive. I’ll try and keep this to the point but I do have a few observations from the trip. In no particular order:
Squeaks and Rattles: My car has a build date of 4/12, one of the first ones built, so initially I was a little concerned about possible “issues”. While we traveled over a few crappy roads on the trip, the car was squeak and rattle free the entire trip, and never missed a beat. It is a solid car.
Cruise Control: Yes, I know – Porsche drivers are supposed to be “engaged” and “drive” their cars, not put them on cruise control. If you do 800 miles plus in a day, you too will use cruise control. The problem with it is that does not maintain a selected speed very well. Mine would vary up or down by 2 mph. It may be designed that way to avoid a “jerky” ride, as the engine might want to always be downshifting to immediately get back to your selected speed. All I know is my Infiniti was a lot better in maintaining speed, smoothly.
Water Temp: It NEVER varies from 194, once it is warmed up. Uphill, downhill, hot day in Phoenix or cold day in Tahoe, loafing along at 2000 rpm or wailing thru the gears while passing two semis and a car at 133 mph: it is ALWAYS at 194.
Oil Temp/Pressure: Varies. Usually, running 75-85 with cruise on, it is right at 233 degrees and 31 psi. Hit a slight incline and as engine starts to work a little harder, the psi will rise a couple of pounds. More of an incline can get it up to 40 psi. Level out and it goes right back down. And as I’ve read before in these forums, engaging “Sport” will drop the temp down to around 217.
Tires/Tire Noise: In preparation for this trip I installed 4 new Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires. I ran them at the comfort setting – cold was 32/36. When I drove around after having them installed I thought they were fabulous – smooth and quiet, especially compared to the 5 year old Pirellis. I don’t think the tires changed, but road noise got to be a real issue. If there are any highway engineers in the crowd maybe somebody can tell me why one section of road can be whisper quiet and then, in the blink of an eye, and in the same state, same county, and exposure to the same weather conditions, it can be so loud you really need to raise your voice to say anything while having a conversation. As alluded to earlier, the roads in Oregon were horrible for tire noise and yet some were much quieter, so they do know how to engineer a quieter road. So why the really noisy ones? Are they cheaper to build, last longer? Without exaggerating, you spend 85 hours in a relatively small car and get hit with a really bad road for awhile and it can bring you right to the edge of insanity. Actually, I think I crossed that line a few times!
Comfort/Space: With two airline overhead sized suitcases upfront (plus several small bags), and a large duffel bag and a small cooler bag for chilled goodies to eat behind us, we really had plenty of room for the just over three week long trip. Space was not a problem and yes, we ate food in the car, it sat out at night, and yet it somehow survived……
Right side cup holder: I doubt the car was “designed” this way on purpose, but a likely unintended benefit of the current layout is that the right a/c vent in the dash keeps a water bottle in the right cup holder nice and cool. Trivia, but nice on a hot day.
Gas Mileage and the Laws of Physics: I’m not a scientist, but I believe the following observation relates to one of the laws. Let’s say we’re driving along a level road for a few hours and have a baseline of 30 mpg (average) so far, and we start to climb up a mountain. Whatever the gas mileage drops to by the time we get to the top, by the time we get back down the other side (assuming a similar drop in elevation, which it usually was), the mileage will be right back where we started. I saw this happen over and over again. Say it dropped to 27 mpg by the time we got to the top of the mountain. At the bottom of the mountain, we would be right back at 30.0 mpg. This repeated throughout the entire trip and with climbs up to Lake Tahoe and driving thru many mountain ranges, there were lots of examples.
Gas mileage in general: Highest observed was coming down from Lake Tahoe to the valley floor outside Sacramento: 39.2 running around 70 mph. Of course that was “cheating” as it was all downhill. Best real gas mileage was leaving Phoenix, level road, cruise on 75, and we got 34.5 mpg, before we started to climb all day. For the whole trip of 5273 miles, it was 29.8 mpg, which was amazing, considering all the around town driving, construction zones we had to get thru, and some of the “high speed” passes…..It is a very efficient engine, to say the least.
I could go on but you get the idea. It was kind of a bucket list item and we had a lot of fun. A few photos:
Ttlwh, concerning road noise from asphalt pavement, it’s a matter of surface roughness. Newly laid pavement will be smooth and quiet. However, If the contractor used an asphalt with more large aggregate rock than ideal in the mix, as the asphalt binder material wears, the exposed larger rock component will be prominent on the surface. This will bounce the tires around not only increasing the noise level but also increasing rolling resistance which will cut your gas mileage.
On the wetter areas of the west coast, there is a lot of experimentation with permeable open-graded asphalt to drain off standing water. One extra benefit is how much it reduces tire noise.
Look at the picture of your car’s tire you posted. Notice that the tread blocks are not all the same width. They vary in thickness in a repeating pattern around the circumference of the tire. This makes the tire quieter. Some big truck tires have even sized tread blocks and they will howl at speed. Lower performance family car tires will have a more complex pattern than your tires, especially in the center of the tread. This contributes a bit in overall noise reduction.
In various places around the world, you may come upon a stretch of ‘musical road’. You’re familiar with the high pitched whine the tires make on a rumble strip, the kind placed on the outside of the road to wake up a sleeping driver. Well, ingenious people have placed less aggressive versions of this into the road lane. By tuning the distance from peak to trough of the rumbles, the passing tires play musical notes. As the car drives along, it plays complex songs and melodies. There is one near Albuquerque, and one in Lancaster, California.
Concrete roads are whole other branch of hell. Also, we have some new scotch single malts in the house tonight; they make me ramble on and on and be crazy.
Roy - Great write-up ! I am glad Terri and you had a fantastic and trouble free trip (I did not expect anything else). Welcome back to Des Moines - happy continuing trails!
Thanks for sharing. These cars are designed to be driven. I have yet to take the 911 on a long trip, but the two previous years I drove my Cayman from DC to Colorado and it was quite comfortable. I can imagine that the 911 is even more so.
06-16-2017, 07:36 PM
5273 Mile Trip in a 911
