For all its resources, Porsche can't seem to lay its hands on a clean sheet of paper. It's been 45 years since the first 911, and still the Stuttgart-based company fiddles and fettles with the iconic design, relentlessly optimizing and improving the car to the point where you'd expect it to disappear up its own tailpipe in a blinding singularity of final perfection. After all this time, is there anything they can do to make the 911 better?
Oh yeah. Meet the 2009 Porsche 911 Carrera, a car with more horsepower, more torque, and vastly better acceleration and fuel economy. Still rear-engined, still small and fierce, and still possessed of that famous silhouette — the jut and rake and slope and stance that connects these cars to 1964 — it's the same sports car yet feels somehow altered at the molecular level.
Speaking of molecules: CO2 is giving Porsche fits. At the research facility in Weissach, executives tied themselves in knots explaining how Porsche — they of the fire-belching tailpipes — were responding to the European Union's demands that automakers drastically reduce carbon emissions. With the new 911, the world's most profitable automaker is trying to satisfy something of an engineering oxymoron: lowering emissions and raising performance. Here is where the genius resides. A full second quicker to 60 mph (4.3 and 4.1 seconds for the 3.6-liter Carrera and 3.8-liter Carrera S, respectively), the new coupe also reduces fuel consumption by 12 percent and carbon emissions by a whopping 15 percent. Stateside, that pencils out to about 24 miles per gallon in the 3.6-liter Carrera and 23 mpg in the 3.8-liter Carrera S. Think of it as a wannabe hybrid with a top speed of 187 mph.
Much of the credit belongs to the dual-clutch gearbox, the Porsche-Doppelkupplungsgetriebe (PDK), which is every bit as fun to say as it is to spell. Because it is late to this technology — Audi, Volkswagen, and BMW all have it — Porsche execs were at pains to note the company pioneered double-clutch boxes back in its eighties-era 956 and 962 race cars. Indeed, one of the fuel-saving strategies is downright old school: Compared to the previous manual or Tiptronic S automatic transmission, the PDK adds a seventh gear, which is a super-tall, Corvette-like overdrive. At 60 mph in seventh, the engine is barely stirring at 1,600 rpm. And that leaves the other six gears to blow your mind.
The PDK is, simply, a stupendous gearbox that can change gears with the silken transparency of the best automatics, or — when the devil is in you — crack off neck-wrenching gear changes like an open-wheel racer. Out on the narrow country lanes of southern Germany, the PDK-equipped Carrera was near perfection, downshifting fiercely ahead of corners (with automatic throttle-blipping — you know, yung, yung, YUNGGGG...) and pulling like a crazed reindeer out of corners. Upshifts are all but instantaneous. Some (like me) will not love the tranny's shifters, those weird metallic blobs in the notches of the steering wheel that you press forward for upshifts and pull back for downshifts. But I imagine I could get used to them. For this kind of pleasure, I could get used to halitosis.
