2013 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 and 4S

2013 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 and 4S In "Downhill Racer," a U.S. Olympics team skier played by Robert Redford lusts after his paramour's Porsche 911. The movie was filmed in 1968-69 in Tyrolean Austria and Colorado, so her 911 has a ski rack (if memory serves), but it doesn't have stability or traction control, or even most of the improvements Porsche has made since then to curb the notorious lift-throttle oversteer of the rear-engine sports car. It certainly doesn't have all-wheel drive, although it does have the weight of the engine over the drive wheels. The new Porsche 991 Carrera or Carrera S ought to be the perfect ride to your favorite ski resort, as long as you have good winter tires on the 21-inch wheels. Besides all those electronic nannies ready to save your bacon in a nanosecond, there's a new, longer wheelbase that pushes the engine back over the axle to make it just a bit closer to mid-engine, and there's the 3.4- or 3.8-liter flat-six putting weight on those rear winter tires. No need for a Carrera 4, is there? Wait a minute.

2013 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 and 4S

2013 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 and 4S

 2013 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 and 4S

2013 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 and 4S

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2013 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 and 4S

All-wheel drive accounts for 34 percent of 911 sales worldwide, says 911 product line director August Achleitner. It's nearly 50 percent if you count the 100 percent AWD 911 Turbo. Porsche isn't about to give up that business -- certainly not to the Nissan GT-R.
So is the Carrera 4/4S worth the extra money and the slight degradation in performance from about 110 more pounds? For an extra $8930 to $9530, you get black rocker panels with an aerodynamic design; 0.04-inch wider tires and 0.9-inch wider rear wheel flares; a red light strip across the rear deck visually connecting the two taillamps; front parking sensor; an AWD system that can shift 100 percent torque to any one wheel, theoretically; and a new torque split indicator on the instrument panel's right bezel. All for about the price of a good, used Subaru over standard RWD Carrera models.
Porsche's AWD system works pretty damned well, if our drive on rainy roads and into snowy mountains is any indication. There was only enough snow to slide it around, slightly, in a mountaintop parking lot. It was just enough to discern that you could have some fun sliding the Carrera 4 through some deep snow, even with the 911's electronic parking brake, and that the system could easily pull the car out of deep snow when necessary. You wouldn't do it, of course, though you might think about it with the 6-year-old WRX winter car you could buy in place of the Porsche AWD system. The car we drove in the morning, including in the snowy mountain parking lot, was the most superfluous of 911s, a 400-horsepower, 3.8-liter Carrera 4S Cabrio. With its PDK transmission, base price is $122,560 in the U.S. In the afternoon, we drove a 350-horsepower, 3.4-liter Carrera 4 coupe with the standard seven-speed manual. The Carrera 4s launch a new feature in the seven-speed manual 911s for 2013, a rev-matching feature that blips the throttle for you, so you don't have to heel-and-toe, in Sport+ mode only, when downshifting. Unlike Nissan's system for the 370Z, the Porsche system does not blip it simply when moving the gearshift from the neutral position to the left of the neutral gate. Porsche blips it only when you declutch and move the gearshift toward a specific gear.
Whether it's the Carrera 4 or Carrera 4S, the 911 is confidence-inspiring on these roads, though that's a function of the winter Pirellis as much as the AWD. Most of the time, the system threw no more than 20 percent of the torque to the front wheels, and in fact under hard acceleration, it often was 100 percent to the rears. There was no way my driving partner nor I, nor any reasonably sane person, would have tried to find the car's limits on these wet roads, and try to figure out how much -- or whether -- it was any better than a RWD Carrera. There, I said it. This is no criticism of Porsche. Quite the contrary; the 911 Carrera is such good car, it makes average drivers look good, and good drivers consider springing for a Porsche Cup weekend drive. It is our Best Driver's Car for a reason, and it's hard to see where you could go wrong with the RWD version and the right tires for the season on anything but treacherously rainy or snowy roads. Even then, the good driver will get by. (See "Downhill Racer," or read Tobias Wolff's sublime short story, "Powder.") So what's it all about? The Carrera 4 is a Northern European car, built for customers who have only one or two cars in the family, even if they can afford the six-digit prices. The U.S. Carrera 4 take rate of one-third 911 Carrera sales is slightly lower than the global take rate. Americans in this tax bracket tend to have property, space, and big garages. You might consider one of these for your winter house in Vail or Aspen, though probably you only need the extra set of winter tires.