First Drive: 2019 Porsche 911 Carrera
What鈥檚 Good: Styling looks fresh, but still pure 911; increased performance bandwidth 鈥?better on track and on road; likely to hold its value well. What鈥檚 Bad: Some interior bits too plasticky; rear seat still next to useless; shift knob looks like a kid鈥檚 gaming system toy. VALENCIA, SPAIN鈥擳he Porsche 911 has had a remarkable run. At its debut at the Frankfurt Motor Show in 1963 and for a handful of production models, it was called the 901, following Porsche鈥檚 design office numbering system. But in France, Peugeot had trade-marked every three-digit car designation with a zero in the middle (205, 404, etc.). Porsche decided to switch rather than fight, and 911 it became, worldwide. Now, Germans have a reputation for being logical. So, why does the 911 still have its engine in the wrong end of the car? The Teutonic mindset also can be a bit on the stubborn side, so I figure they have just stuck with this until they got it right.
Boiled down to its essence, it is both faster and more comfortable than its predecessor, not an easy parlay. Porsche is launching the new 911 with the higher-performance 鈥淪鈥?model in coupe body style, with either rear- or four-wheel drive. The cabriolet, non-S and the usual host of variants will follow in due course. The added performance comes primarily from a more powerful engine, still a 3.0-litre twin-turbo flat six. Larger and relocated turbos pump more air into the cylinders, and do it faster for better responsiveness and reduced turbo lag. Piezo injectors whip air-fuel mixture into the cylinders more quickly and with more even distribution, which aids both power and emissions. The compression ratio has been raised to 10.2:1, high for a turbo engine, in the pursuit of better throttle response. The iconic 0 鈥?100 km/h sprint time is 3.7 seconds for the rear-drive car, 3.6 for the four-wheel drive, because it gets better grip off the line. These are about four-tenths quicker than the outgoing model. On the Nurburgring鈥檚 Nordschleife (north loop), the new 911 does a lap in 7:25, some five seconds quicker than the previous model.
At launch, the only transmission available will be a PDK double-clutch manumatic, now with eight forward ratios. A manual gearbox will follow later this year. Styling-wise, it is obviously still a 911. The car has grown about 20 mm in length although wheelbase stays the same. It is, however, 45 mm wider, for a more muscular look. The most obvious visual differences are the full-width front grille, and the equally full-width LED light strip at the rear above the licence plate recess. Wheels are larger, with the rears wider than the fronts for the first time. In all, I found it pure 911, but nicely updated and modernized. Inside, I was delighted to see they did not slavishly copy the Panamera鈥檚 minor controls which are all touchscreen nonsense. The 911 is meant to be driven, so all controls fall easily to hand, and they include five proper toggle switches at the front of the console.
They took a gamble with the shift knob. Apparently, this was the subject of much discussion among the engineering and design teams. The engineers lost this round because it鈥檚 a silly little lever sticking up from the console which you have to pull back to select Drive, push forward to get Reverse. But to get back to Drive, you have to tug on it twice. Worse still, Park is not where it has been since 鈥?oh, maybe 1955. You have to push a separate button to engage it. Other cars have gone down this same road too. A little 鈥淰ogel鈥?told me that when they re-engineer the console to incorporate the imminent manual gearbox, a better shift knob for the PDK might come along too. The instrument cluster is all digital, but retains the big centrally located analogue-style speedometer. As with other current Porsches you can dial up a wide variety of info via the various screens. The SatNav screen in the middle of the dash is big and bright, but trying to navigate with it caused us some issues.