The all-new 2012 Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet will be joining the 911 Coupé for next year. First models of the Carrera and Carrera S convertible can be expected as early as March 2012 worldwide.
Driving while sitting two inches away from a raspy high-revving engine is rather uncommon for most people. It’d mean you’re either driving a Ferrari 458 or a Toyota Hiace. But somewhere in between is the Porsche Cayman, supposedly the most balanced sports car in the world. We can now confirm that, after our stint with the Cayman R.
Porsche Centre Dubai, a part of Al Nabooda Automobiles in the UAE, delivered 211 new cars in the month of August, apparently the best monthly performance ever for any Porsche Centre dealership worldwide. But that’s not the interesting part.
The Porsche Cayman R does not need to exist. It is merely a stripped-down Cayman S with 10 extra horses and tighter suspension. Maybe we need to correct ourselves — the Cayman R does not need to exist as a car that the general public can buy. What Porsche should do is slap on some stickers and sell it only as a professional track race-car.
Early leaks had already revealed the unsurprising looks, but full details have officially been released for the 2012 Porsche 911. Dubbed the 991 generation, this version has actually undergone a heavy transformation under the skin. The initial launch includes the Carrera and the Carrera S.
It seems like just yesterday when the world proclaimed the Cayenne as blasphemous to the Porsche cause. And yet, the Cayenne became Porsche’s best-selling model as soon as it was launched in late 2001. The formula continues with the new-generation model, redesigned from the ground up, and much more in tune with the Porsche philosophy.
This is the first time we’ve ever driven the Porsche Cayenne outside of a racetrack. Memories of chasing 911s in the Cayenne Turbo at the Porsche Roadshow are still fresh in our minds, but the streets are a different thing altogether. And even if it was for only a day, we still got a decent look at the most overlooked of Cayennes – the base V6 version.
The Porsche 911 is probably the longest-running sports-car nameplate ever. It has retained some semblance of familiarity since its debut in 1963, improving with every generation, eventually reaching a point where they cannot further optimise the shape any more. There are thousands of 911s running around the world right now. And yet, very few people have actually been behind the wheel of these so-called “iconic” cars. Are they really iconic? Well, we finally got behind the wheel of the 911 Carrera GTS to find out, if only for a day.
When we heard that Porsche Middle East had bumped up their test-drive period to a little more than a day now, we were more than a little pleased. Previously, Porsche used to hand over test vehicles for just six hours at a time so as to avoid naive journalists, drunk or otherwise, from trashing their cars. So we’d never bothered to drive their cars before, outside of their spectacular roadshows at local race-tracks. But things change, and we went ahead and asked for a Porsche 911 Carrera GTS.
Porsche has released early “spy shots” of their next-generation 911 sports car. Dubbed the 991-generation, it looks as you’d expect a 911 to look, which is to say, indistinguishable from older versions, but Porsche is making drastic changes beyond the styling.