Let's suppose you have a bad case of the midlife blues and can afford to cheer yourself up by buying any car in the world. Which one would you choose?
Me, I might hesitate about whether to get a convertible or hard-top, whether to get the turbo-charged engine or not, and if yellow, grey, or midnight blue would be the best color. But I'm pretty sure I'd buy a Porsche.
The Porsche Carrera, which has been redesigned for 2005, isn't the fastest car around. With a stick shift, the S version of the car -- S for sport, the one with the extra-powerful 355-horsepower engine -- only does 0 to 60 in 4.6 seconds, vs. 4.2 seconds for the new Corvette convertible and under 4 seconds for a Ferrari. There are also plenty of more expensive sports cars you could choose. The 2005 Carrera S starts at about $90,000 -- considerably less than, say, a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti ($275,000) or an Aston Martin Vanquish S ($255,000).
CARE PACKAGE. But dollar for dollar, pound for pound, sports cars don't get better than a Porsche -- and the 911, of which the Carrera is one classic version, is pure joy to drive. I took my "speed yellow" Carrera S for a long cruise with the top down in the rolling hills of northeastern Pennsylvania one sunny Saturday, and for a quick run along the Delaware River one evening just as the sun was setting.
Cars don't get any better. There's none of the corner-cutting in the interior you often find in American cars, where one or two cheap features mar the overall effect. In the Porsche, you're constantly aware of the care that went into making the car perform well while also making it comfortable.
Unless you're a Porsche fan, the 2005 Carrera probably doesn't look much different from previous versions. But to aficionados, there are obvious changes. The headlights are oval and smaller than on the preceding model. The six-speed manual gearbox also has a 15% shorter throw, so the shifting is sharper and more precise -- at least going forward. I had trouble several times getting the car into reverse, a problem I also had on the previous version of the car.
RAISING THE ROOF. To my eye, the new 911 is sleeker than the last one. Its drag coefficient is a low 0.29, making it one of the least wind-resistant cars in existence. It also has 19-inch wheels with distinctive, brutal-looking red brake calipers on each wheel. That's one way you can tell it's an S model -- the calipers on the basic Carrera are black. When a car accelerates so fast and tops out at 182 mph, you need huge brakes in case a deer or something happens into your path, and this car's brakes are significantly bigger than those of the previous Carrera.
The new Carrera comes standard with the Porsche Active Suspension Management System, which lowers the car by one-third of an inch vs. the regular suspension, and automatically increases damper forces on both axles to avoid sway during hard driving. Porsche says it appreciably improves lap times on its test-track in Germany. If you want a classic sports car's hard ride, just push a button on the dash and the difference is quite noticeable. You'll really bounce around on bumpy back roads. A rear spoiler can be raised and lowered manually via a switch on the dash.
There are all sorts of thoughtful touches in the car's interior. In most ragtops you have to unlatch the convertible top manually, but this one is entirely automatic, retracting into a covered space behind the passenger cabin, and going back up and latching itself without help.
Copyright 2005, Bloomberg L.P.
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