Yahoo Autos 2022 Porsche 911 Carrera GTS Road Test: Just shy of perfect
Sometimes, it’s tricky to pin down what I enjoy about a car. The 2022 Porsche 911 Carrera GTS is little more than an enthusiast-oriented popular equipment package for the iconic sporting GT. While Porsche’s designers put in the time to give the GTS a subtly distinct aesthetic, there’s really nothing here you can’t get on a “standard” 911, provided you’re willing to pay for it. And yet …
The 911 is a difficult car to describe without shared context. Like the Mazda Miata, Toyota Camry or Jeep Wrangler, it’s one of those cars with a reputation so well-established that people feel confident forming an opinion about it even if they’ve never experienced one for themselves. In other words, perfect magazine racing fodder. Yet, no amount of time spent learning about the 911 is an adequate substitute for the experience. I’ve driven more 911s than most and fewer than many, and even I've been guilty of making up my mind before actually turning the key for the first time. My pre-existing notions were accurate as often as they weren’t.
Like “911” itself, “GTS” sets a certain level of expectations. Those letters say “this is the one you’ll want to keep driving," even if that may seem a bit redundant for a 911. They tells us that we should expect a package that includes a chef's menu of performance upgrades that make 911s more fun to drive, mated to a correspondingly sufficient quantity of creature comforts, and nothing more. Also, since it’s a Porsche, you pay more to get "less." In the company's defense, the GTS actually has a decent value proposition.
Our evaluation car was a rear-wheel-drive model with the seven-speed stick (Hallelujah!) and a blessedly succinct window sticker: just 15 items — six of which merely enumerated the options in the GTS Premium package. If it had been blank apart from standard equipment, our tester would have stickered for $138,050. In this market, a meaningless figure, but it’s what the piece of paper said.
Ours rang the till at $152,700. Among the $14,650 in options were Porsche’s rear-wheel steering and front axle lift systems, ventilated leather seats and the aforementioned upgrade package (surround-view camera, upgraded Bose audio, additional storage, ambient lighting and lane-change assist). Not barebones, strictly speaking, but remarkably restrained for a 911 build list. That’s also much cheaper than it would be to option up a 911 Carrera S with the same equipment, since the GTS bakes in a sportier tune for Porsche’s Active Suspension Management, and adds sport exhaust, the Sport Chrono package and beefier brakes. For more on the nitty-gritty, check out our First Drive of the Targa GTS.
On paper, the bump from Carrera S to GTS is not dramatic. The extra 30 horsepower (for a total of 473) and 15 pound-feet of torque (420) Porsche extracted from the twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter flat-six result in performance increases that read like rounding errors. The official 0-60 time drops by 3/10ths of a second (to 3.2 seconds) and the top speed increases from 191 mph to 193. This was my first time behind the wheel of a 911 GTS, so I did my best to hit the reset button on my expectations and go in blind.
