How the New 700+HP Porsche 911 Turbo S Uses Hybrid Tech to Smoke the Old One - TheSmokingTire

Here's where I get serious, because I sit on the door sill like this. Hello and welcome everybody to Southern Spain, where a year ago I was here to drive the 911 GTS with the new T-Hybrid engine. Go back and watch that, like and subscribe, por favor. Well, it's no coincidence that Porsche have invited me back to the same mountain roads and the Ascari circuit again to try the all-new 911 Turbo S T-Hybrid. That's right, it has joined the GTS in hybrid land. It's a perfect day for the drive, so I'm taking the convertible out on the road before hitting the track in the coupe. It's a two-for-one on the smoking tire. Let's go. A new 911 Turbo is a big deal. Each successive generation means a big increase in performance, thanks to some kind of novel new tech. Think about it, this is where Porsche launches its coolest stuff. Variable turbine geometry, torque vectoring, PDK, ceramic brakes, etc. Now, as it just so happens, the hybrid tech itself isn't all new. Like I said, we saw it last year in the GTS. But the commitment, as well as the number of turbos, has been doubled up. Of course, the name 911 Turbo is kind of hilarious now, isn't it? I mean, the complete Porsche lineup, with the exception of the GT3, is actually turbocharged. Even the Taycan and Macan come with variants called Turbo. It really doesn't actually have anything to do with the engine anymore. It just means, in Porsche-speak, this is the really fast one that's also really comfortable. That means big freaking power. This new one has a twin-hybrid turbo powertrain, making 701 horsepower and 590 pound-feet across the widest power band in the history of the 911. The 630-horsepower combustion engine features three additional e-motors, one inside each turbo and one in the PDK gearbox. The one extra pony on top of the 700 makes it officially the most powerful 911 of all time. Whether it truly makes one more horsepower than the old GT2 RS will be a fun test to do later. But Porsche says the Turbo S will hit 0-60 in 2.4 seconds, two-tenths quicker than last year's car, which was already, if you recall, nuts. Why waste any time? Start with a launch. There we go. Oh, God. Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Okay, now, Porsche says this will do 0-60 in 2.5 and run a 10.75 mile. I would bet a lot of money that they're sandbagging and on a good day you're getting nines out of this. Maybe not the convertible, but certainly the coupe in a light configuration on the right tires. Interesting enough, because of the car's weight and choice of tire, the top speed has been limited to 200 miles an hour, minus five from last year's car. Now, despite the top-end leashing, the new car still laps the Nurburgring 14 seconds quicker than the old car at just under a 7.04. If you recall last year with the GTS, there's a single turbo with an electric motor in between the compressor and the turbine. That electric motor can spool the turbo, building boost as low as idle, but also acts as a generator when the turbo keeps spinning off throttle. It then can dump current back into the battery. This car has the same 1.9 kilowatt-hour battery as the GTS, but with two electric turbos, it can fill that battery twice as fast, producing more power output for the PDK motor. The electric part of those turbochargers is the same across both cars, although the size of the turbos is not the same. The GTS has one larger turbo, this has two smaller ones. They can spool up faster and they can spin faster, so the result is even better response and more power than the GTS. The entire powertrain makes 169 horsepower more than the next powerful 911. That is crazy town. Out here on this beautiful canyon road, I am not using the power. I can't. You couldn't. It would be a lie if you told me you could, but out here what I'm feeling is that new electric hybrid PDCC is really, really doing wonders on the ride. This now has that 400 volt hybrid system. There's no more belt drive, so the 400 volt hybrid system controls the suspension, the air conditioning, the starter motor, all kinds of stuff that they can eliminate creating a completely new powertrain, and I do mean completely new. When asked how many parts this engine shares with the DOT 1 engine, the answer is one, the injector, and there's six of those, so six, but that's it. Everything else on this engine is brand new, ground up, or shared with the GTS. And look at this, the new nose lift runs on the 400 volt system, so it actually goes up and down faster than ever before. Look at that. So we're just going to go back to normal mode and putter for a minute. Automatic. In the GTS, what I noticed was this low-end off-the-line torque provided by the electric PDK motor. In the Turbo S, the electric PDK motor is the same motor, but it makes more power because the electric motors in the turbos spit out more power. Does that make sense? Inside the turbos, that electric motor can become horsepower or electricity, depending on what you're doing with the car, and because you have two of them, it can feed more electricity to the third motor, and therefore you have more power. And then on top of that, the 400 volt system offers better shock tuning, so the Turbo S, even though it's heavier, stiffer, or in theoretically stiffer, higher performance, actually has better body control than the softer cars just because of that power. Porsche is pitching this as a sort of best of everything, right? 703 around the Nürburgring, but also super luxury with every luxury feature coming standard, right? The convertible is well insulated, it's meant to be a four-season car, it's meant to be a daily driver, and then it can run 703 on the Nürburgring. It's got to be a little of everything. But, and here's where I get serious because I sit on the door sill like this, the term Porker, to affectionately refer to a 911, has really never been more accurate than because this Cabriolet is the first 911, as far as I can tell, to cross the 4,000 pound mark. Not exactly something to brag about, and even the coupe version is 3,829 pounds, the heaviest Turbo S ever. The sound is interesting. It's a true dual exhaust for the first time in a 911 Turbo. There's no collector. And it's got even more of that sort of old-school air-cooled sound that I got out of the GTS. It does not sound at all like the three-liter Turbo cars. Very different all the time. The question, of course, is what are we giving up? Well, maintainability, I guess. This is unbelievably complex, and I would be shocked if Indies can work on it in five years. Weight and price. It ain't cheap either. This is a big, big money car. High twos, possibly into the threes if you're light to medium with the options. But it's the car for everything. Want to run nines? Turbo S. Want to hit the Autobahn for three days and go on a Swiss Alp road trip? Turbo S. Want a daily drive for the next 15 years in total comfort, any condition, and if you don't have a lot of luggage, could truly be your only car? Turbo S. They ain't wrong, folks. But this car is so fast that there is absolutely no way I can experience it on this beautiful road. So we're going to put the convertible away, go to a starry circuit, and rip a coupe as fast as I can. The thing about the Turbo S is that it's very serious. Goes about its business very seriously. And so we try to find some whimsy, right? You need whimsy in a car. And this car is so committed to what it's doing that it's almost not fun. I mean, I don't mean it's not fun. I just mean it just, it's almost like, you know, a driving robot. But there's an Easter egg in it. And apparently there is a mode to do rolling burnouts. It's called like tire warm-up mode. So you tug the paddles. Left foot brake, paddles, right foot gas. Go. Yeah. That'd make us a smoky burnout. That is, in fact, a smoky burnout. Maybe. The thing about this car is not just that it's more power. It's the width of the power band. The widest, meatiest power band ever. And also, it will slide. When driving dynamically, this thing can couple, decouple, and partially decouple the front drive. So when you're in Sport Plus and really hustling and you have grip, it's about 95% rear wheel drive. And speaking of rear drive, those rear tires are 10 millimeters wider than before. Go. Yeah. So the car is serious. The car is about all-wheel drive. The car is about poise. But that doesn't mean you can't drive it past that. You most definitely can. But immediately, I mean really, I mean immediately, it's just so poise. Coming out of like performance car of the year, I was driving these cars that are kind of ragged. You got to fight it. This is like a driving robot. If you don't make it move around, it just won't. I mean, it's so composed and refined. And the way the PDCC, look, but you can back it in a little bit. So if you want to rotate it, you can't do it on power. You've got to back it in. Fortunately, the brakes and the front grip are aces. So you just stand on the nose and it will rotate. Just fabulous stuff. The power band is crazy wide. I mean, it's right off of idle. You're getting power and you can really be in a higher gear here. You don't have to zing it to red line all the time, particularly on the road. Oh man, Ascari, what a treat, huh? What a beautiful circuit. But this car, and you could say this about most Porsches, but this car, it's just happy to go around and around and around and around and around. And it is no funny business. There's no drama unless you make drama. Like I'm going to make some drama here. Hey, let's go. See Chris Harris is out here doing fourth gear slides at like a hundred. I can't quite swing that, but third gear at 60. Yes, I can. It feels solid, but it's not a GT3. I mean, it's like 500 pounds heavier than a GT3 and you can feel it. It got a little confused on that one, or maybe I did. I don't know. This is the most aerodynamically effective 911 turbo ever. It now has active splitters in the front, the rear and behind the front splitter, which can help adjust the balance of the downforce in and around the wheel arches, which is very cool. And then of course you have those vertical front slats that open or close depending on what you need. In today's case, they're open. Look, it's heavy, but it's sticky. The agility is still there. And when you think about the fact that you could just drive cross country and total comfort in this thing. And then I like that flip there. I like that little 90 degree whip around. That's all right. Redline's only 75, so it's not such a revvy engine, but it's huge torque, 590 pound feet of torque and such a wide power band. Such a wide power band. It's just so versatile. Versatile is the word, which is what they want. I mean, oh baby, oh baby, I'm getting along with her. It's supposed to be good at everything. And it turns out it's pretty good at the track too. Just with these Pirelli PZero R's. Same tire I just had on the Audi RS3, although I'm sure this is a Porsche spec one. Pretty good tire. Now the question is, where does it fall in my desirability index of 911? I'm going to say this. It's probably not the one for me. And that's because it is so fast and is so capable, but it also really masks. It also really masks the speed. I mean, I can feel it building, but it's not building in a way that overwhelms me, but the number is going up so fast. I mean, 700 Porsche horsepower is probably equivalent to eight or 900 Ford horsepower. The poise, the composure, it makes everyone a hero. I mean, it does everything so well up to and including the slidey stuff that you kind of wonder what this isn't good at. Okay, so downsides. Yeah, it's heavy, still agile. So there's that. Rain, snow, Autobahn, drag strip, racetrack, canyon roads. It's probably weakest at canyon roads, not because of what it can do, just because of its size. It feels big. It is big. And on these tight Spanish roads, it never lets you forget it. On the circuit, that doesn't matter. On the highway, it doesn't really matter. But everything one expects from a 911 Turbo, insane performance, no drama about it, a new type of technology that helps to get you there. That's what it is. Thank you for joining me in Spain, everybody. This has been a lot of fun, and I appreciate you very much. See you later. And don't forget, always fight your tickets. Go to offtherecord.com slash TST for 10% off all legal services from Off the Record.