Yahoo Autos 2020 Porsche 911: A Careful Redesign of a Legend
We have to give Porsche credit for turning the tables on us with its next 911. No, no, it won’t be mid-engined or-gasp!-front-engined. It won’t give up its vestigial rear seats. And its shape won’t morph into something rectilinear. Like most generations of the 911, the 992 version (the current car is designated 991.2) will look very much like the 911 it replaces.
No, Porsche turned the tables on us by transforming itself from the hunted to the hunter. Typically, we are the ones pursuing prototypes; the carmakers, or rather their test drivers, are the ones trying to evade us. Well, with the 992 generation of the 911, which will be unveiled before the end of the year, a partially disguised prototype has been hounding us for months near our Ann Arbor, Michigan, headquarters. The blacked-out mule seems to be at the local Zippy Auto Wash every time we show up there. How clean does a camo’d prototype really need to be, anyway?
Do you know how we know it’s a 911 prototype? Because it looks like a 911. In fact, it looks so much like a 911 that Porsche apparently thinks it can hide the car in plain sight.
We expect the 992 version to be fractionally larger than the 991.2 it replaces. But it won’t grow the way it did from the 997 generation to the 991, when the wheelbase expanded by four inches. We know, however, that even the narrowest rear-drive 911 will be wider than before, since both rear- and all-wheel-drive Carreras will now wear the same wide body to simplify production. When the Turbo model arrives about a year after the Carrera and Carrera S models, it will distinguish itself with an even thicker rump.
That’s Turbo with a capital T. The regular models also will be turbocharged, just as the later 991s were. In fact, the new 911 will be powered by essentially the same engines as the last one. The twin-turbo 3.0-liter flat-six will put out about 400 horsepower in the standard car (up from the current 370). The S model will also gain about 30 horses, for a total of roughly 450. Porsche will again offer both manual and dual-clutch automatic transmissions, at least for the first few years of this generation’s run. When the model gets a facelift, we expect that Porsche will introduce all-new engines and may cancel the manual transmission, something the company has been threatening to do for years. And yes, the long-rumored hybrid version is a possibility, although Porsche has no immediate plan to make it. The 992 is large enough to accommodate the electric motor and batteries, should the company decide to go down that road. But then, the 991 was also large enough to package the electro-gear, and the 911 hybrid never appeared.
If the exterior looks pretty much like the current car, the interior is significantly different than it was before. On either side of the typical center-mounted tachometer are screens for reconfigurable digital secondary gauges and/or information that carmakers believe the modern driver desires. The dual-clutch’s stubby shifter makes room on the center console for a cupholder. So there’s that. The 2020 911, in base coupe form, will go on sale early next year starting right around $100,000. Prices will go up from there, should a buyer fancy an S model, all-wheel drive, or a convertible. And that’s before the buyer leafs through what will surely be a long list of options. In other words, it’s still a 911.
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