Review Porsche 911

The Porsche 911 must be one of the world’s best adverts for the power of continuous product improvement. Through nearly half a century of refinement since it was conceived as a larger, more comfortable successor to the Porsche 356 and was powered by a 2.0-litre, 128bhp flat six engine, this effervescent sports car has kept up with the standards of the market’s freshest performance machinery. Technologies such as fuel injection, turbocharging, four-wheel drive and, most famously, moving from air to water cooling have been integrated. All the while, its legendary and utterly beguiling motive character has survived undimmed.

But never has the 911 taken such a significant leap as the one that delivered it from ‘997’ to this-generation, the ‘991’. With 90 per cent of the car’s mechanical ingredients new or improved, this 911 features completely new axle dimensions, electromechanical power steering, a downsized engine, a construction richer in aluminium than ever before and the passenger car’s first seven-speed manual gearbox.

Even though it’s substantially new, a casual observer isn’t going to mistake this car for anything other than a Porsche 911. Its shape is now so easily recognisable that it has become an icon.

However, in its latest iteration Germany’s most famous automotive export has grown by 56mm in overall length, 100mm in wheelbase and 46mm at the front track over its predecessor.

If you understand basic physics, you need know very little of this Porsche’s dynamic backstory to work out why. With a longitudinal engine and gearbox hung out behind its rear wheels, the 911 has always been fundamentally inclined towards two idiosyncratic behavioural problems: power understeer and body pitch. For lever, fulcrum and load, think body, rear axle and engine. With more space between both the axles and the individual front wheels, both key dynamic challenges have been addressed here.

Aluminium has been used in place of steel throughout a great deal of the new 911’s construction. On the ‘991’, almost all of the exterior body panels are aluminium and most of the body-in-white, except in areas such as the car’s pillars, where high compression strength is required.

As a result, on the coupé there’s like-for-like weight saving of around 45kg over its predecessor (depending on which model you are driving and what extras and are fitted), and a 20 per cent improvement in torsional rigidity.

The cabriolet is a few millimetres lower than than the coupé, but it’s so fractionally different to be almost inconsequential. Porsche also claims a similar weight saving over its drop-top predecessor of 45kg, although its actual kerbweight is inevitably higher (around 50kg) as a result of all the associated strengthening. The torsional rigidity of the drop-top is said by Porsche to have improved by 18 per cent over that of its predecessor.

In design terms, the main head-turning feature of the cabriolet is the all-new ‘panel bow top’ roof, the frame of which is constructed from fabric and composite plastic and sits on a frame made of magnesium and aluminium.

This new roof has several packaging benefits, not least that Porsche has been able the follow the profile of the coupé’s roofline more closely than it could with the old-style multi-layered fabric structure. It drops in 13 seconds.

Porsche 911 cabins have, over the generations, been if not good then good enough. The car’s 2+2 seating has made everyday usability a long-serving trump card, but there’s now so much more to recommend this driving environment. Porsche can, at last, be congratulated for making its sporting icon as comfortable and well appointed as almost any £70k sports coupé on the market.

Whether you’re in the coupé or cabriolet, your view forward is framed by a high scuttle and a wide plateau of a dashboard. The sense of intimacy with your passenger has been reduced a little by greater interior width, and by a dividing centre console that rises as it flows forward to meet the fascia’s centre stack.

Like every other control panel in the new 911, that centre stack is fitted with neat, aluminium-accented switchgear arranged in logical clusters. There are no afterthoughts here and nothing haphazard or even remotely out of place. Tactile material quality and haptic feedback are also first-rate.

You’ll find warmer and more ostentatious cabin treatments in other sports cars, it’s true, but this one remains slavishly devoted to function, namely, the business of driving, hence the large central tacho and the inclusion of both oil and water temperature gauges. But 911 devotees wouldn’t have it any other way.

Space for passengers in both the front and rear seats ought to have been improved, given the car’s longer wheelbase. And yet maximum head and legroom measurements in the new 991 911 are, according to our measurements, as close to those of the 997 coupé to make for no meaningful improvement to overall accommodation. The rear chairs remain for children only, and then only if those in the front seats are prepared to give up some legroom.

Meanwhile, the cabriolet features a wind deflector that can be deployed from the cockpit, so there’s no faffing around trying to fit a deflector that lives in the boot. It can’t eliminate all wind noise and buffeting but the reduction in the amount of cockpit ‘swirl’ with the deflector raised is dramatic.