Porsche News
Moderator
- Joined
- 8 Feb 2008
- Messages
- 7,361
997.2 Carrera 3.6 long-term test review by Car Magazine
Month 1 running a Porsche 911 (997) Carrera: introducing our second-hand 911 test
As first drives in a new Porsche 911 go, this must rank pretty highly. Sun shining. Walk up to Guards Red 911, pop the front lid, throw in an overnight bag, then get behind the wheel and drive from Sussex to Le Mans to watch Porsche's works return to the world's greatest race after too long an absence.
And there was no pesky running-in period to spoil the fun. FE59 SJY is, you will have noticed, a three-and-a-half year old, second-generation 997, and arrived showing 26,601 miles. Almost all the long-term test cars we run are box-fresh, and might not even need a service in the course of a year's use. A year in a new car is still revealing, and our experience useful to anyone considering buying one. But it doesn't reflect how many of us buy cars. Some of us will buy only used, and most of us will consider swapping new-car smell for the pleasure (and associated risk) of buying something previously cherished, but two rungs up from what we could afford to buy new.
Research tells us that for many of you that wild-card used-car buy is a Porsche 911. Experience tells us that the 911 is so phenomenally well-made that nothing should go wrong in year one. Little is likely to go wrong in years four to five either, but this test should still make for a more interesting, relevant read.
And if there is a rainy day, we have the umbrella of the Porsche Approved Used scheme to protect us. It supplied our car, which has been through the scheme's 111-point check and benefits from a comprehensive two-year warranty, which is effectively the same as that given to new cars. Once issued, mileage is not limited, which might be useful given the thousand miles I put on my car in its first weekend with me. And the two-year Porsche breakdown cover specifically includes recovery from a racetrack, which is generous and appropriate, but I hope unnecessary.
The theory is that with this kind of cover, you ought to be able to extrapolate your known costs (big services, etc) over the length of time you plan to keep the car, take a reasonable stab at likely resale value (not hard to work out, and the worst depreciation has passed) and calculate with some confidence what driving one of the world's great sports cars will cost you. It will compare more favourably than you might think with buying something more mundane, but new.
(Please excuse the digression into service costs and depreciation4 and fuel economy here: I haven't forgotten to be stupidly excited about driving a 911 for a year, but this stuff is important, right?)
To dial up the affordability angle to this story, and give me the man-maths ammunition to justify running a 911 rather than another sensible diesel, I was set on having a base Carrera. It's easy to forget how gob-smacking this second-generation 997 was when it was launched in summer 2008. It got bigger brakes, a mild suspension rethink that finally tamed the 911's nose-bob, and LED daytime running lights that are among the few ways to spot it from a first-gen car.
But more importantly, not only was it the first Porsche to get the firm's PDK twin-clutch gearbox, but it also had an effectively all-new engine. Lighter, smaller, set lower in the chassis, with lower friction and a Bosch direct-injection system, it pulled off that rare trick of managing both a significant increase in power – up 20bhp over the old unit, to 341bhp – and an equally significant decrease in consumption and emissions: down 15% to just 225g/km. That still sneaks it inside band K for road tax, and will save you around £200 a year on anything vaguely comparable. And it will do 0-60mph in 4.7 seconds, or 4.5 if fitted with the optional Sport Chrono Plus pack, as mine is. 4.5 seconds! What am I doing at my desk writing this?
The 997 was launched in 2004, and this major revision wasn't perfect. The exhaust note was muted and the wheel-mounted button-shifters were bafflingly crap, given that Porsche says it waited a quarter of a century between competing at Le Mans with a PDK 'box in a 956 in '83 and putting it in a road car in '08 to ensure it was 'entirely perfect'. It wasn't. Those buttons were Porsche's biggest engineering mis-step in years. A paddle-shift option was soon offered, and the buttons subsequently forgotten.
One of the joys of an approved-used scheme is that it's almost as good as speccing a car yourself, especially if you're prepared to be patient. Buying a car at around three years old makes things even easier, as a lot come off lease and back into the dealer network at this age, so there's more choice.
This car was chosen by Porsche to best represent their used offerings, and not by me. Had I been choosing for myself, I'd have picked a more subtle colour for daily use, and the sweet, simple five-spoke wheel. I'd have opted for the sports seats, as I find the squab in the standard seats too flat, and I'd have tried to find a car with the optional sports exhaust.
Most of all, I'd have picked a car without those bloody buttons, but the good news is that Porsche can replace them with a new wheel and paddles for a very reasonable £864.71, and you get to keep the old wheel to throw rotten vegetables at. So I had that done, and will also retro-fit ISOFIX mounts and airbag deactivation in the front, so I can carry our 16-month-old boy.
But the fact that this isn't my personal choice of spec won't colour the experience. You'll be able to get pretty close to your ideal 911, and frankly, there's no such thing as a bad one anymore. This car, before the mods, was offered at £43,850, against a list price of £62,899 new, and £69,538 with options at '09 prices. Those include the PDK box (£2288 at the time), the 19-inch upgrade wheels (you won't find many on the standard 18s) and inside, the extended nav package, heated seats, rear park assist, Bluetooth, an iPhone connection and contrast red stitching.
It looks sensational. The Guards Red – the oldest colour in Porsche's paint pots – and the wheels are both growing on me, but that's purely subjective. The standard, unadorned narrow-body 911 is a pretty thing, and although we criticised this second-gen 997 at launch for not signalling its engineering advances more clearly with a new look, you'll be glad of Porsche's glacial rate of design evolution when you buy used. This still doesn't look like a superseded model, even when parked next to a 991, as it was often at Le Mans.
The wheels and bodywork show not a sign of the car's (now) 28,000 miles. Same inside: other than some light scuffing to the kickplates, this looks and smells like the 997 press cars I was driving until recently. The front seats seem miraculously unworn, and those rears look like they've hardly been sat in (this is a joke). The controls feel as tight and consistently heavily weighted as ever, but that's to be expected. 28,000 miles won't trouble a 911 much.
And that first drive? As special as you might expect, and a foretaste of how good a year in a 997 might be. On the long drag down to Le Mans, its manners were perfect, the PDK's super-overdriven seventh giving an easy, efficient cruise, with 28mpg and 300 miles between fills at a faster autoroute pace than we might choose in the UK. Around the tight corners and over the odd cobbled dips of the medieval centre of Le Mans it was wieldy and stress-free, unlike anything more exotic. But like those exotics, which abound at Le Mans, it still got the crowds excited enough to take its photo as it passed, and me excited enough to get drawn into a too-quick convoy on the way home which resulted in a brief, cordial and costly conversation avec les flics.
But most importantly, I swear I could feel the sway of that ancient circuit in the car that took me there: in its utter unburstability, in its meaty, deliberate controls, in the note of the flat-six engine design which has lapped Le Mans more often than any other. Other brands talk about the link between their road and race cars, but in a Porsche you just feel it. No disrespect to Audi, but even after all their wins at La Sarthe you're not going to feel that in the mildly specced-up 2.0-litre TT you could buy new for the same money. I think it's going to be a good year..
Month 2 running a Porsche 911 (997) Carrera: joining the village car show
Long, hot summer days and Guards Red Porsche 911 ownership are seriously detrimental to the productivity of the self-employed. Fortunately, I can't actually see it from the window of my office at home, or I'd get no work done at all.
When you're calculating the total cost of ownership of a used 911, you're not being honest if you don't include the value of the hours lost to 25-mile round trips to get a pint of milk. Or you can see it the other way, and justify the cost with the fact that you're buying not only practical everyday transport – which this car is proving to be – but also a leisure activity: though there's nothing particularly leisurely about the way it goes down the road.
Certainly, there's little I could have bought new for the same money that would have won me invitations to exhibit at both our village 'vintage' car shows. Villa d'Este and Pebble Beach have nothing to fear from this corner of rural Sussex, yet.
But there was an impressive turn-out, including Edwardian Renaults and de Dions, a Model T, a pair of '30s Rolls-Royces, various E-Types, and an ex-Duncan Hamilton Jaguar C-Type (the very first) towed by a MkVII saloon. Even against that lot, the 911 drew plenty of interested visitors. It might be a little more frequently seen, but it's still one of the world's great cars.
By Ben Oliver for http://www.carmagazine.co.uk/
Month 1 running a Porsche 911 (997) Carrera: introducing our second-hand 911 test
As first drives in a new Porsche 911 go, this must rank pretty highly. Sun shining. Walk up to Guards Red 911, pop the front lid, throw in an overnight bag, then get behind the wheel and drive from Sussex to Le Mans to watch Porsche's works return to the world's greatest race after too long an absence.
And there was no pesky running-in period to spoil the fun. FE59 SJY is, you will have noticed, a three-and-a-half year old, second-generation 997, and arrived showing 26,601 miles. Almost all the long-term test cars we run are box-fresh, and might not even need a service in the course of a year's use. A year in a new car is still revealing, and our experience useful to anyone considering buying one. But it doesn't reflect how many of us buy cars. Some of us will buy only used, and most of us will consider swapping new-car smell for the pleasure (and associated risk) of buying something previously cherished, but two rungs up from what we could afford to buy new.
Research tells us that for many of you that wild-card used-car buy is a Porsche 911. Experience tells us that the 911 is so phenomenally well-made that nothing should go wrong in year one. Little is likely to go wrong in years four to five either, but this test should still make for a more interesting, relevant read.
And if there is a rainy day, we have the umbrella of the Porsche Approved Used scheme to protect us. It supplied our car, which has been through the scheme's 111-point check and benefits from a comprehensive two-year warranty, which is effectively the same as that given to new cars. Once issued, mileage is not limited, which might be useful given the thousand miles I put on my car in its first weekend with me. And the two-year Porsche breakdown cover specifically includes recovery from a racetrack, which is generous and appropriate, but I hope unnecessary.
The theory is that with this kind of cover, you ought to be able to extrapolate your known costs (big services, etc) over the length of time you plan to keep the car, take a reasonable stab at likely resale value (not hard to work out, and the worst depreciation has passed) and calculate with some confidence what driving one of the world's great sports cars will cost you. It will compare more favourably than you might think with buying something more mundane, but new.
(Please excuse the digression into service costs and depreciation4 and fuel economy here: I haven't forgotten to be stupidly excited about driving a 911 for a year, but this stuff is important, right?)
To dial up the affordability angle to this story, and give me the man-maths ammunition to justify running a 911 rather than another sensible diesel, I was set on having a base Carrera. It's easy to forget how gob-smacking this second-generation 997 was when it was launched in summer 2008. It got bigger brakes, a mild suspension rethink that finally tamed the 911's nose-bob, and LED daytime running lights that are among the few ways to spot it from a first-gen car.
But more importantly, not only was it the first Porsche to get the firm's PDK twin-clutch gearbox, but it also had an effectively all-new engine. Lighter, smaller, set lower in the chassis, with lower friction and a Bosch direct-injection system, it pulled off that rare trick of managing both a significant increase in power – up 20bhp over the old unit, to 341bhp – and an equally significant decrease in consumption and emissions: down 15% to just 225g/km. That still sneaks it inside band K for road tax, and will save you around £200 a year on anything vaguely comparable. And it will do 0-60mph in 4.7 seconds, or 4.5 if fitted with the optional Sport Chrono Plus pack, as mine is. 4.5 seconds! What am I doing at my desk writing this?
The 997 was launched in 2004, and this major revision wasn't perfect. The exhaust note was muted and the wheel-mounted button-shifters were bafflingly crap, given that Porsche says it waited a quarter of a century between competing at Le Mans with a PDK 'box in a 956 in '83 and putting it in a road car in '08 to ensure it was 'entirely perfect'. It wasn't. Those buttons were Porsche's biggest engineering mis-step in years. A paddle-shift option was soon offered, and the buttons subsequently forgotten.
One of the joys of an approved-used scheme is that it's almost as good as speccing a car yourself, especially if you're prepared to be patient. Buying a car at around three years old makes things even easier, as a lot come off lease and back into the dealer network at this age, so there's more choice.
This car was chosen by Porsche to best represent their used offerings, and not by me. Had I been choosing for myself, I'd have picked a more subtle colour for daily use, and the sweet, simple five-spoke wheel. I'd have opted for the sports seats, as I find the squab in the standard seats too flat, and I'd have tried to find a car with the optional sports exhaust.
Most of all, I'd have picked a car without those bloody buttons, but the good news is that Porsche can replace them with a new wheel and paddles for a very reasonable £864.71, and you get to keep the old wheel to throw rotten vegetables at. So I had that done, and will also retro-fit ISOFIX mounts and airbag deactivation in the front, so I can carry our 16-month-old boy.
But the fact that this isn't my personal choice of spec won't colour the experience. You'll be able to get pretty close to your ideal 911, and frankly, there's no such thing as a bad one anymore. This car, before the mods, was offered at £43,850, against a list price of £62,899 new, and £69,538 with options at '09 prices. Those include the PDK box (£2288 at the time), the 19-inch upgrade wheels (you won't find many on the standard 18s) and inside, the extended nav package, heated seats, rear park assist, Bluetooth, an iPhone connection and contrast red stitching.
It looks sensational. The Guards Red – the oldest colour in Porsche's paint pots – and the wheels are both growing on me, but that's purely subjective. The standard, unadorned narrow-body 911 is a pretty thing, and although we criticised this second-gen 997 at launch for not signalling its engineering advances more clearly with a new look, you'll be glad of Porsche's glacial rate of design evolution when you buy used. This still doesn't look like a superseded model, even when parked next to a 991, as it was often at Le Mans.
The wheels and bodywork show not a sign of the car's (now) 28,000 miles. Same inside: other than some light scuffing to the kickplates, this looks and smells like the 997 press cars I was driving until recently. The front seats seem miraculously unworn, and those rears look like they've hardly been sat in (this is a joke). The controls feel as tight and consistently heavily weighted as ever, but that's to be expected. 28,000 miles won't trouble a 911 much.
And that first drive? As special as you might expect, and a foretaste of how good a year in a 997 might be. On the long drag down to Le Mans, its manners were perfect, the PDK's super-overdriven seventh giving an easy, efficient cruise, with 28mpg and 300 miles between fills at a faster autoroute pace than we might choose in the UK. Around the tight corners and over the odd cobbled dips of the medieval centre of Le Mans it was wieldy and stress-free, unlike anything more exotic. But like those exotics, which abound at Le Mans, it still got the crowds excited enough to take its photo as it passed, and me excited enough to get drawn into a too-quick convoy on the way home which resulted in a brief, cordial and costly conversation avec les flics.
But most importantly, I swear I could feel the sway of that ancient circuit in the car that took me there: in its utter unburstability, in its meaty, deliberate controls, in the note of the flat-six engine design which has lapped Le Mans more often than any other. Other brands talk about the link between their road and race cars, but in a Porsche you just feel it. No disrespect to Audi, but even after all their wins at La Sarthe you're not going to feel that in the mildly specced-up 2.0-litre TT you could buy new for the same money. I think it's going to be a good year..
Month 2 running a Porsche 911 (997) Carrera: joining the village car show
Long, hot summer days and Guards Red Porsche 911 ownership are seriously detrimental to the productivity of the self-employed. Fortunately, I can't actually see it from the window of my office at home, or I'd get no work done at all.
When you're calculating the total cost of ownership of a used 911, you're not being honest if you don't include the value of the hours lost to 25-mile round trips to get a pint of milk. Or you can see it the other way, and justify the cost with the fact that you're buying not only practical everyday transport – which this car is proving to be – but also a leisure activity: though there's nothing particularly leisurely about the way it goes down the road.
Certainly, there's little I could have bought new for the same money that would have won me invitations to exhibit at both our village 'vintage' car shows. Villa d'Este and Pebble Beach have nothing to fear from this corner of rural Sussex, yet.
But there was an impressive turn-out, including Edwardian Renaults and de Dions, a Model T, a pair of '30s Rolls-Royces, various E-Types, and an ex-Duncan Hamilton Jaguar C-Type (the very first) towed by a MkVII saloon. Even against that lot, the 911 drew plenty of interested visitors. It might be a little more frequently seen, but it's still one of the world's great cars.
By Ben Oliver for http://www.carmagazine.co.uk/
