Remember Nikki Catsouras? Possibly not. The young lady borrowed her father’s 911 Cabriolet, made a mistake at speeds reported to be in excess of 100 miles per hour, and was killed in a remarkably bloody and graphic fashion by the blunt end of a tollbooth.

Remember Chris Brown? The singer and occasional girlfriend-beater mildly crinkled the nose of his 911 Turbo S Cabriolet while ostensibly avoiding a squad of photographers.

Ever think those two incidents might be related?

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The 2.7-liter 911S was so problematic that I named it as one of Porsche’s Deadly Sins a couple years ago. Its engine failed with monotonous regularity, often between the expiration of the 12,000-mile warranty and the 50,000-mile mark on the odometer. The 1974 models usually lived a bit longer because they didn’t have thermal reactors, and the 1977 models had improved Dilavar head studs, but none of the “S” cars were reliable in any modern, or even contemporaneous, sense of the world. In the thirty-five years since the model was replaced with the “Super Carrera” three-liter, however, the aftermarket has managed to address the core issues and build reliable replacement engines for these otherwise charming classic coupes.

As the snow started to fall in Central Ohio this past weekend, I fired up my own aircooled 911 and took it downtown to meet a restored example of its ancestors.

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This is a great video, and it showcases just how quickly things happen in a racing Porsche… including bad things.

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Vellum is a material at the heart of Automotive and Industrial Design.  Venom is something this website has in spades: so a few positive comments from a recent Piston Slap column brought the two concepts together.  Before we start; some ground rules:   I analyze what’s seen from my camera phone, no press cars and therefore no time to second guess my thoughts.

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To celebrate the arrival of the, well, in a way, new Type 991 911, the Porsche Museum Stuttgart launches a great 911 retro- and introspective.  On display from today until 20 May will be an overdose of 911.  (Read More…)

I know what you’re thinking.

I’m thinking it too.

Why me? How, with a host of competent hot-shoes, seriously-journalistic scribes and industry insiders here at TTAC, do the keys to a presser Porsche 911 get handed to the guy who publicly admitted to being not a very good driver and who has an unfortunate tendency to use four long words where one short one would do nicely? Would not the readership be better served by someone who could give you an in-depth, accurate 10/10ths dynamic assessment, or a brief, sober buyer’s summary?

Oh, probably. But there are two very good reasons I’ve got this thing.

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Today, Porsche officially disclosed top-secret pictures of the new “Neunelfer”, a.k.a. the 2012 Porsche 911. Most of these pictures have already been all over the webs. In a year, you’ll find them on Wikileaks.

In the name of completeness, here is the whole take, released today, along with the news that:

“At 48, the Porsche 911 Carrera is younger than ever: The completely redesigned generation of the sports car icon is stepping into the limelight with its flat, stretched silhouette, exciting contours and precisely designed details, yet from the very first glance it remains unmistakably a 911. True to the 911 tradition, the distinctive Porsche design language with its tendons and muscles exudes power and elegance.”

Who’s writing those lines?

Though this new 911 is all-new from the ground-up, and some two and a half inches longer than its predecessor… well, it looks like just another 911, doesn’t it? The Panamera-style interior is the biggest change in terms of design, but the rest of the design is just a tweaked-and-smoothed version of the shape we’ve become very accustomed to. Of course, nobody was expecting anything dramatic from the model that defines evolutionary design in the modern car world, but after the major improvement between the 996 and 997 generations, I was expecting a little more than this. Oh well, at least it’s still a 911.

With only a tiny bit of front-end camouflage left, the new Porsche 991 has been almost completely revealed… can you tell? One thing is for certain, Porsche’s not about to lose its reputation for evolutionary styling anytime soon.

No, not the silly humpbacked 911. That’s just Porsche’s latest wallet-lightening technology. Porsche’s nod to heritage is in the fact that it’s building only 356 of these 911 “Speedsters.” Because, you see, the first Porsche Speedsters were based on the Porsche 356. Oh yes, and by limiting an “exclusive” to a few hundred units means Porsche can charge $204,000 for a 408 HP 911. Which, after all, is actually the more significant nod to Porsche heritage: the 911-based Speedsters, which arose in the cocaine and yuppie-fueled 80s, have long been a high point in Porsche’s proud tradition of charging silly money for ever-so garish “special editions.” Doesn’t heritage just make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

While reading the responses to a recent BMWBLOG posting by Josh Lewis, I noted that one of the posters had put together a very interesting comparison of the BMW M3 and the Porsche 911. To put it mildly, somebody’s gone Kirstie Alley while somebody else has stayed Goldie Hawn:

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Those of you steeped in traditional Catholicism know that we have just one of Porsche’s Deadly Sins left to go before the end of the series. What better time, then, to take a moment to talk about just why people do choose to become Porsche owners. Time and time again in my “Porsche’s Deadly Sins” series, people have asked me basically the same question, to wit:

If Porsche is such a terrible company, and they make such terrible products, why do you have three of them?

It’s a simple question with a not-so-simple group of answers. Buckle up and let’s talk about it.

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Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to a Porsche Club meeting and annoy perfectly decent upper-middle-class people.

One of my favorite shticks is to sit there at the wine-tasting/slow-food dinner/whatever and say, “I love my Boxster, but I love the Cayman so much more.” Knowing nods from around the table. “It’s just that I like the convertible too.” More knowing nods. “What I really wish Porsche would do…”

Pause.

“…is make a Cayman convertible..”

Dead silence.

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Time to “Revive The Passion”. The Porsche Club of America wants its members to get more excited about their money-raising raffles. Although the raffles usually sell out — I’ve waited too long in the past and missed my chance to win cars like a Cayman 2.7 or Cayenne S — presumably the rate of sale is decreasing.

The first step was to offer cash as an option: disgruntled PCA members who were sick of Porsche’s many concessions to modern cost-cutting reality could then go buy the car they really wanted. Now the club has come up with an even better idea.

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Great artists steal, and I’m obviously inspired by Paul Niedermeyer’s GM’s Deadly Sin series here. I am currently the owner of three Porsches, as pathetic as that may be, and I’ve experienced firsthand the many ways in which Porsche disappoints its fans and buyers. Few companies have been as comprehensively whitewashed by the media and the corporate biographers, but the truth is available to those of us who wish to look a bit harder.

We will start with the big betrayals, of course, and the unassuming fastback you see above represents perhaps the worst of Porsche’s many middle fingers to the customer base. It is a 1999 Porsche 911, known to everyone in the world as the “996″.

From 1964 to 1998, the 911 evolved on an incremental basis. As with the first and last Volkswagen Beetles, there are very, very few parts which survived the thirty-four-year journey unchanged, but there’s an amazing amount of interchangeability. It is possible to “update” a 1971 911T to look just like a 1998 Carrera 2S, and it’s also possible to “backdate” a 1994 911 Carrera to look like a classic 1973 Carrera RS. Both of these offenses against human decency have occurred many times, incidentally. Take a look here to see a rather lovely example of a “964″ turned into a “long-hood” 911S, in a color that will be familiar to many TTAC readers.

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