Porsche 911 review

The GTS now features rear-wheel steering as standard and will get roll-stabilising PDCC as an option. This is now powered by the new 400V system.

As before, the GTS comes in many forms. It's offered as a coupé or a cabriolet with rear- or four-wheel drive or as a 4WD Targa.

While no version is two tonnes, there is a payback for the extra tech. Porsche says it adds 50kg, thus the RWD coupé sneaks in at 1595kg, but among the changes for the facelift is that the rear seats are now a no-cost option, so you have to factor those in too. And even without them, the Targa 4 GTS weighs 1745kg unladen.

The 911 is still lighter than most sports cars (Aston Martin quotes a dry weight that’s heavier than the GTS for its new Vantage), but it’s clear that nobody but Caterham and the like are exempt from 'progress'. 

Lower down the range, the changes are less momentous but still worth discussing. The standard Carrera, the T and the S all stick with the twin-turbocharged 3.0-litre engine, albeit with a few upgrades. The Carrera has gained the charge cooler from the Turbo and the turbos from the old GTS. Despite that, power is up only 9bhp, while torque stays the same. For the time being at least, they're only available with rear-wheel drive, although you can have them as a coupé or as a cabriolet. PASM adaptive dampers are standard across the range. The Carrera gets uprated brakes, with six-piston calipers replacing the four-piston items on the front and the discs growing 20mm in diameter all round.

More than ever, the Carrera T is positioned the ‘keen driver’s choice’. As such, it gets less sound insulation, PASM Sport adaptive dampers, rear-wheel steering and the Porsche Torque Vectoring limited-slip differential as standard. Most significantly, while the standard Carrera is only available with the eight-speed PDK dual-clutch automatic, the T is always a manual. New for the 992.2 is that the manual gearbox loses its seventh gear. You can take that literally: it hasn't adopted the six-speed from the GT3. It's simply the old seven-speed with the same ratios, minus the top gear. Losing the fifth shift plane is supposed to improve the quality of the gearchange.

Later in 2025, a Carrera S will also join the range. It sees power from the turbocharged 3.0-litre flat six lifted from 444bhp to 473bhp, which allows latest iteration of the rear-driven 911 shaves 0.4sec off the 0-62mph time to complete the sprint in just 3.3sec and it tops out at 191mph. The power uplift comes courtesy of new turbochargers and an "extensively optimised" cooling system. The Carrera S runs the same brakes as the GTS Hybrid, with 408mm front discs and 380mm rears.

You can recognise the 992.2 by its quite substantially altered front bumper. The indicators and running lights are now integrated into the main light clusters instead of sitting underneath. This makes room for much bigger air intakes than before. The Carrera has two horizontal spars running across them. In the S, the intakes are even bigger, whereas the GTS has more distinctive vertical slats. At the back, the characteristic light bar has become a bit chunkier.

Then to the next car, and very suddenly it becomes clear. A flat-out gallop in the Carrera is more of a jaunty canter in the 4 GTS. Whatever else Porsche has done to the GTS, it has made it astonishingly urgent. The new engine is louder, gruffer and less nuanced than the old 3.0, and its responses are fabulously fast. The drive motor can pitch in at any engine revs and the e-turbo motor can maintain turbo revs, so there’s no discernible lag. It rips around the rev band. 

Under braking and cornering, you can feel the extra bulk over the Carrera but also that it’s better tied down. You might think it's effectively the same as the Carrera, but in reality it's quite different in character – more so than before, perhaps obviously. It’s bolder, brasher and less analogue and takes about 80% of the effort to go at the same speed on a circuit. 

The rear-driven GTS shares the 4 GTS’s urgency but replaces some of its corner-exit stability with a tad extra adjustability and agility. For us, this is where the GTS is at its best, with all of the response of this new engine but as little extra bulk as possible and easier, uncorrupted, feelsome steering.

Since those early drives, we’ve also tested the standard Carrera, a Carrera T Cabriolet, and the GTS on UK roads.

Driving the Carrera in isolation, it’s hard to see what more you could need. Like every 911, it rides firmly and transmits quite a bit of road noise, but pick up the pace and it seems to relax. In the softer suspension mode, it has a hint of the fabled 911 ‘nose bob’ as it breathes with the road rather than trying to emulate a skateboard.

Despite the 911 having grown over the years, it’s still a manageable size, even on narrower B-roads, and the steering lets you place it precisely and reassures you that the grip is there.

In the dry, it basically always is. You don’t bully or provoke a modern 911, because there’s little point. It’s at its best being smoothly flowed along while you enjoy the superb steering and poise and the lovely engine.

The brakes are strong and easy to modulate too.

You would have to drive the Carrera T back-to-back with a standard Carrera to really feel the difference. The T is a little stiffer, but not excessively so, and the four-wheel steering stays largely in the background. The lighter weight would be extremely hard to detect, and given the 911 is noisy at a cruise anyway, we would have preferred more sound deadening rather than less.

Unlike previous Carrera Ts, the '992.2' T is also available as a Cabriolet, whose 90kg weight penalty more than nullifies any weight saving. With that said, the 911 is very good as a drop-top, gaining very few convertible-typical shakes and shimmies.

We will bring you a full road test of the Carrera GTS soon, but for now we can say that it works surprisingly well on the UK's bumpy roads. It immediately feels firmer than a normal Carrera, but the quality of the damping is such that it takes challenging roads in its stride. Meanwhile, the steering feels meatier and more connected than on the standard car.