The New Porsche 911 is a HYBRID? Driving the 992.2 GTS | Henry Catchpole - The Driver's Seat

this is the new 911 GTS T hybrid and obviously because it's a hybrid it's absolutely terrible so I thought I should drive around in the tarer 4 GTS which is clearly the worst least sporting model because well we must have all just pack up and go home I mean hybrid it's just a Toyota Prius isn't it I give up except this is not the time to abandon all hope because this is a slightly different sort of hybrid with a distinct reason for its existence and a very positive impact on performance if this film electrifies your turbo then do please think about joining the haggy drivers Club you get an award-winning magazine and Myriad other benefits to find out more just click on the link below well that's a different start we'll come back to the hybrid start in a minute but I think it's first worth going through all the other bits that make up this GTS and some of the changes and it's weird for a start to be driving a GTS as the first model in a new variant of the 9911 because well it normally comes at the end and sort of cherry picks all the bits of the other models but this is very much its own Standalone thing the first distinctive thing you'll notice about the GTS unless you approach it at night or with with your eyes closed is of course the way it looks we've now got these sort of Venetian blinds at the front which are well they sort of quite fun I think they stay closed in normal and Sport and wet wet obviously just to keep stuff out from those front radiators but in normal in sport you want the lowest coefficient of drag possible so they stay closed then in Sport Plus or if the brakes get too hot they open up to let more cooling air go in there's also another important flap in fact just under under the nose as well which works in tandem with those in exactly the same way to also Aid the cooling over the front we've also got new HG Matrix headlights with new sort of Graphics I suppose in terms of the sort of slashes across them the four slashes instead of just the dots we had before all the lights are in fact now housed in the main units making for a subtly cleaner look at the back on top of the engine cover we've got the sort of streaks that go up and seem to blend more into the rear green on this new GTS we've also got a new rear diffuser with a tail pip sort of closer together in the center you can get an arrow kit as well with a fixed Wing that adds up to 30 kilos of downforce at the rear you can't put that on a Target though that would just be silly inside a lot of the Interior is well very familiar from the first generation of the 992 but there are a couple of big changes starting with the dials in here because gone is the physical Central rev counter which is well it's a shame really I get why they've done it because it was getting harder and harder to see the sort of outer dials as this steering wheel shrinks in diameter so you were sort of having to look around to see the ACT edges of what was on the screen behind it so they've shrunk it down and they've given this sort of seven different layouts in here which you can scroll through like this including well a digital fact simile of what was there before so works well it's just a bit of a shame something else they've now integrated Apple carplay into here sort of much more deeply you can have your native apps in there we've got a a cooled charging Bay in there for your iPhone or Android and then in the back because as standard this now comes without rear seats it's just a two-seater not just the target all across the range this one actually has got the seats and it is a no cost option to have them back in and that's all to do with weight which we'll come back to other things to say well we've got more pts options as well exterior colors 127 of them now including presumably Ruby Stone this Target is painted in Carmine Red by the way and in case you think I was being horribly disparaging about it in the intro I do realize it's some people's favorite and it's half Coupe half convertible hybrid roof does look very at home down here on the Costa Del so it's just that at 1745 kilos or about £ 3,850 this car weighs £ 150 kilos 330 more than the lightest GTS available the taret also has slightly different suspension it's worth mentioning so it doesn't get the 10 mil drop and it doesn't have the helper springs that you find on the rest of the GTS range so it is just that bit less sporting and then we come back to the hybrid system and I think we should start with why why has Porsche done this and there are all sorts of good reasons as to why they've gone e hybrid in terms of performance and response but at the root of it the very core of the reason is to do with emissions where it gets confusing is that the new GTS has broadly very similar fuel consumption and CO2 emissions figures to the old non-hybrid GTS so what gives well this is all to do with a new piece of legislation around something called Lambda 1 so what is Lambda equals 1 well with the help of my trusty analog writing in The Amazing Porsche pencil here I shall attempt to explain Lambda is the 11th letter of the Greek alphabet and in terms of cars it's used to express the mixture of Fuel and air when Lambda equals 1 it's the perfect mixture so everything is burnt up and the catalytic converters also are at their happiest they're working at the most efficient if Lambda is greater than one up here then your engine's running lean so you've got more oxygen on that side of things and potentially it's more efficient but the catalytic converters aren't working as well if it's running less than one Lambda then your engine is running rich you've got more fuel in there than oxygen so you're having un burnt fuel now most of the time you think well that's fine just run Lambda equals 1 clearly it's the most efficient way perfectly sensible the trouble is in a high Performance Engine sometimes you want to run your engine a bit Rich why is that well in a high pance engine obviously High revs lots of high torque the engine will get hot and you need to find a way cooling that down and a very efficient easy way of doing it is to run it a bit Rich so you have unburnt fuel in there that cools the engine down but the catalytic converter doesn't like it and now legislation has said we don't like it either because emissions they're not great so you've got to run at Lambda equals 1 which means the car companies like Porsche have got to find a way of keeping the performance but keeping the temperatures down without running rich given all this what are the options perhaps the best way in terms of power and torque outputs is with water injection because you can actually get more power by using water injection but it is a bit of a fa because you have to keep topping up obviously some sort of water reservoir and carry more fluids around with you instead Porsche went down an electrified route but a regular weighty plug-in e hybrid wasn't what was needed here this required something a bit different something a bit more Formula 1 let's bring our 911 GTS T hybrid up out of the floor I feel like some sort of Silicon Valley Dumbledore right now there it is and if we strip away the body workor from this we can see what is underneath and what is powering this new 911 up the front we got a battery so it's not the 12volt battery it sits in the same place as before to keep weight distribution the same it weighs 27 kilos it's a 1.9 KW hour battery so it's not um it's not that big a battery but that doesn't actually matter it is lithium I liquid cooled and 216 cells in it now if we move further down the car and I think if we actually just strip away some of the other stuff so we can see what is going on in the car more clearly in the middle we've got an e motor so it's a 40 KW e motor which is producing 53 brake horsepower 111 PB feet of torque and that sits inside the 8-speed pdk then as we move further back down the car we have the engine it's a totally new Flat 6 engine so 3.6 L instead of 3 l before but they've kept the Bor and stroke ratios uh the same to make it easier for them because they understand those pretty well now as you can see they've actually stripped quite a lot out because of this new architecture so it sits 110 mm lower than before and there's no belt drive no starter motor either on its own this engine puts out 478 brake horsepower and 420 lb feet of talks that separate from the e- motor now the other thing you might have noticed that we've gone down from two turbocharges to just the one and that is an e turbocharger the first thing to say is that this new turbo is bigger not this humongous obviously but larger and as with the Flat 6 having a larger capacity this all helps keep temperatures down which is crucial however a larger turbo means slower spooling up so this has an electric motor between the turbine and the compressor wheel so that when there aren't enough exhaust gases the motor can do the job instead and spin it up it also means porer can get rid of the waste gate and when there are enough exhaust gases to spin the turbine the motor can then act as a generator and send up to 11 KW back towards the battery which is key to maintaining Lambda at one clever stuff and probably not something to service at home but how does it feel to drive time for the track this is a bit more like it so now we we've got obviously a coupe rear wheel drive so this should be we've got carbon roof as well the 1595 kilos the sub 1600 kilos that they were aiming for we've also got proper suspension in this so we've got the 10 mm drop for the sports suspension the pdcc which I've got turned on now because we're in Sport Plus that's also been uprated for this so they have haven't really talked about it that much because obviously the hybrid has taken well the majority of the Limelight but with the new electrical architecture they've been able to make use of all of that and make the pdcc the anti roll system respond that much more quickly just for some context so this has 534 brake horsepower as a system 450 lb ft of torque the GT3 503 brake horsepower and 347 foot of torque so this has got significantly more certainly in terms of torque add in some big 315 section rear tires in the new GTS can reach 60 mph in just 2.9 seconds 3/10 faster than before and a 10 faster than even a GT3 RS it's obviously still some way behind the RS in terms of outright lap time but nonetheless in the hands of yor bergmeister this GTS the Nord slier in just 7 Minutes 16.9 seconds 8.7 seconds quicker than the previous GTS the steering I noticed as soon as I got into this there's a really nice weight to it gives you a lot of confidence and it's easy to balance the car through the corners on the road rides really well so we've also got the helper springs in this that we didn't have in the taret yes you can feel extra weight over a GT3 but it's so well controlled and gives you so much confidence over these curvs rides those well enormous great brakes obviously which you'd expect given the extra weight this has got the optional carbon Ceramics the PCC BS and now a monstrous size they're 420 mm in diameter on the front with the 10 piston calipers from the turbo 410 mm on the rear I love ascari what a cool circuit with all these Corners inspired from other circuits around the world right down to this tight corner here I feel like the downshifts aren't quite responding as snappily as i' perhaps expect from a pdk upshifts are absolutely fine this 8 speed has been strength understandably for the new hybrid power train but the response of it is extraordinary both on the track but out on the road as well you go for an overtake absolutely there it's almost as though it doesn't matter what gear you're in the engineers say that the turbo response time for this T hybrid has dropped from 3 seconds to under 1 second to reach full Boost but I'd say the overall effect of the whole system feels even more impressive than that sounds I also love the fact that it can essentially act like anti-ag on the way into Corners keeping the turbo spooled up for the exit the other thing is that if you just don't think about the fact you're in a hybrid you don't really notice it there's no sort of gaps or holes in the torque delivery which is really nice cuz sometimes in the past with hybrids you can kind of get an initial Surge and then a dip and then a rise again but with this it just doesn't seem to happen like that the only thing is because there's so much response the whole time it's almost quite difficult to know what gear you're in it sort of almost plays with your mind a bit because there's just response everywhere talk all over the place what's also fascinating is having the screens up here so I can see where the energy is going whether it's going into the turbo or the motor or coming back into the battery and also on the rev counter up here you've got the little green and blue going left and right which if you get distracted by it well it's quite easy to get distracted by it particularly out on the road because it just it's fascinating watching it how much actually how much it's regening into the battery I'm driving pretty quickly around here you think using an awful lot of that battery depleting it a lot we still got 75 along with the E turbo both the E motor and the Flat 6 can also help to recharge the battery with regen under bring or when full performance isn't required for acceleration as mentioned it does all add weight but the engineers say when you tot it all up it comes to 46 kilos or1 for the hybrid system alone take away a cheeky 10 kilos for the now optional rear seats add in 14 kilos for things like the standard rear wheel steer and you reach the 50 kilo Delta over the old nonhybrid GTS do you feel it most of the time not really only just right at the limit you can feel the rear weight still this is still a 911 when you really start pushing the limits just out you recover from slides that's where perhaps you can feel some of the weight coming in but it's controllable for everybody that was trepidacious about porir 9/11's going hybrid you really don't need to be I was as skeptical as anybody about this new GTS but it really is so impressive and the contrast to a nonhybrid 911 is Stark I got into the newly updated Carrera afterwards and was slightly shocked at the difference the base 911 is 3 l Flat 6 now has the turbos from the old GTS the intercooler from the old turbo and puts out a decent 389 brake horsepower and 332t of torque it's 75 kilos lighter too and yet the response is night and day the Carrera is also missing one thing at the moment what I would like is a manual gearbox which obviously you can't now get in the GTS because you've got that electric motor in the pdk so manuals are out for that there is no option for AEM manual in the Carrera at the moment but I spoke to Frank mosa who is Mr 911 at the moment and 718 line as well and he just said we have some ideas years so hopefully it's not the death of the manual in the Carrera even with pdk the base 911 is still a lovely thing to drive and costing a whisker under £100,000 it's a significant 30k less than the GTS but more than ever before it now feels like there is a much greater gap between the two offerings in terms of performance sound and sportiness Emissions might be the sterile sounding reason for the T but the result certainly isn't lacking in Emotion [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Hagerty

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Keywords: Hagerty, Classic Car, Classic Cars, Hagerty Drivers Club, collector car, enthusiast car, collector cars, Henry Catchpole, driving, driver, car review, car test, Porsche 911, hybrid, hybrid turbo, Porsche hybrid, Porsche 911 GTS, Carrera, GTS T-Hybrid, eTurbo, e-turbo, eMotor, lambda, lamda, Apple Vision Pro, test drive

Id: Wk7GQnZ5dYg

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2024