Here is the full article. Thanks to 'Car' for allowing me to reproduce the article as it is a great read for the 964 owner. I do ask you however not to copy or reproduce these pages/photos anywhere else, copyright belongs to 'Car' and not me. Thanks.
You can look at each page here. Pages are between 60kb and 140kb. Patience! But they are readable.
Here is the most of the feature's text.
A Toyota Avensis, like a plank of wood, is a perfectly serviceable item. It is well designed, it does its job properly and it doesn't cost very much. I have no quarrel with the Avensis, and do not criticise those who choose it.
That's not what we're getting at by urging you never to buy a boring car again. The point is simply this: for every straightforward car buying choice you can make today there is an alternative which will say more about you and help you to have much more fun.
It will cost you the same money and afford you the same utility. It will set you apart. We have already started buying into this niche culture, as any mainstream manufacturer will tell you. That's why Honda, which can't shift the worthy but dull Accord, turns to fashion off-roaders and edgy mini-MPVs to fill its order books.
It's also why Ford has sanctioned the Jaguar X-type, which probably best illustrates the point (X-type or top-spec Honda Accord? Hmmm). The car creates some of the volume that Mondeo, good though it is, can no longer deliver.
So, if you want an MPV, why not add VW Microbus to your Galaxy/Voyager shopping list? If you fancy a hot hatch, why not a BMW Compact instead of a honed-up Astra? A Mini, perhaps, and not a Polo? And - best of all, I reckon - instead of a new Celica why not a secondhand Porsche 911, the greatest cleverest used buy you'll ever make? It could even be your next company car. Remember, this isn't about one car being better than another. It's about freeing up your mind when you draw up a shortlist for the biggest purchase of your life. It's about making yourself the promise that we offer on the cover of this issue: Never Buy a Boring Car Again.
Greg Fountain , Editor
Click picture thumbnails for larger images.
SUPERCAR THRILLS MEET EVERYDAY PRACTICALITY IN THE ORIGINAL PORSCHE CARRERA 4 - THE FIRST MODERN 911 AND NOW A £20,000 BARGAIN
STORY BY PAUL HORRELL
PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOM SALT
The
company still insists on calling itself Dr. Ing. b.c.F. Porsche AG.
All Ferdinand's qualifications in place, all the full stops present and
correct. Everything very much in
ordnung. Equally in order are
the cars. They simply don't do
shoddy in Stuttgart. This is
precision engineering, cars built like the rock of ages.
Each makes them such fantastic used buys. Please be aware of what you are not about to read.
This isn't a ‘Classic Supercar for Mondeo Money'.
No-one really sits down and chooses between five doors with a three-year
warranty, and two seats with the time-bomb of a four-grand gearbox rebuild.
No, this is about a car with modern reliability.
We're here to see whether you really can enjoy and depend on a
middle-aged 911 in place of the new front-drive four-pot coup? you were
contemplating: an Alfa GTV or Toyota Celica.
Of course, there's no point to this if the 911 drives like a clunky old
car. It might have felt good in
1989, but does it now?
The choice of a Carrera 4 is very deliberate. It was the first modern one; previous 91ls had 'love' and 'hate' tattooed across their knuckles, but the C4 was all-new down below, decked out in completely new suspension, ABS, power steering and, crucially, four-wheel drive with electronic torque distribution and, for all I know, a software plug-in predisposing it to helping old ladies across the road. The other thing about a C4 is that £20k puts you into the busy part of the price band. We're not talking about a rock-bottom high-miler of dubious provenance or left-hand drive. At this price, you can be choosy.
And
the car I'm driving is the sort of thing you'd choose. It
looks, and more important feels, almost completely unworn.
It has only 56,000 miles up. Sure,
it has the slightly shiny plastics and soft, puffy sunvisors of a decade-old
car, but to steer it's A1. John
Miles has owned it for eight years. He
paid £26,500 then, so he has seen it depreciate a grand a year in that time. Try that with a new car.
This ability to hold value is alone enough to free you up some cash for
the fuel, tyre and insurance appetite of a supercar, not to mention the odd
unexpected maintenance bill. Routine
servicing costs John £500 a year with ex-works specialist Ray Northway
(Northway Porsche on 0118 971 4333). You
need brake discs and front suspension bushes every so often, Miles adds -
another bill of similar order. His
most expensive was a new dual-mass flywheel and clutch, at £1500, but with them
in place he's confident it's fit for another 50k.
He looks alter the car properly, but it isn't spoiled; he does three
track days per year.
As one would. With the 964, Porsche went to 3.6 litres and 250bhp. This engine has remarkably deep lungs, a willing pull and sharp response at every position on the rev dial, and that delicious fuzzbox wail all the time. Right from the start you know this is a genuinely aristocratic engine; any movement of your foot - even no discernible movement, just the teeniest increase in pressure through your sole - has its effect. But when you floor the thing and it passes 4000rpm, it opens its mouth into a caveman yowl, announcing a renewed surge of power that's just as primal. The car feels faster than 250bhp; it'll do 0-60mph in 5.9sec and 165mph, but what really grabs you is the ease with which it finds its speed.
When
the original 911 gave way to the 964, then the 993, then the current 996, the
same slogan echoed across the nation. 'It's
not as sharp as the old one. The
feel has gone. It's not such a challenge any more.' Give us a break.
These cars developed, that's all. They
got more modern. From a 2001
perspective, the 964 C4 has simply sublime steering feel and brilliant real-road
handling. It dives into every bend
with the nose lightness you'd expect, and you know about it through your hands
as soon as the front tyres are even thinking about getting to their limit.
As the nose goes over a crest, you feel it, As the road surface changes
in a curve, you feel it. As you squeeze the throttle and the rear digs in and the nose
goes light, you feel it. And yet
there isn't any particular kickback or clonkiness.
The constant chattering at the steering isn't an absence of refinement,
it's a presence of life. The
Carrera 4 is also pretty stable in a straight line, even over bumpy back roads,
with little of that viciously bucking front end that plagued its predecessors
(which I never drove when new) and even its wide-tyred two-wheel-drive Turbo and
964 RS successors - which I did drive and which implanted deep In me a certainty
that I'd never come to truly love the 911.
Come today's 996, I did start loving 911s, but this old Carrera 4 showed
me that I shouldn't have tarred all the old ones with the same brush.
I remember even the Carrera 2 frightening me, not because it threw me off
the road but because it always felt to me, even in a straight line, that it
wanted to. Blame that wandering,
tippy-toe-light front end. In the
C4, the nose is pulled rather than pushed, and it's more emphatically
housetrained because of it. And
looked at alongside 12 years of progress elsewhere, you get a car that certainly
doesn't have modern supercar grip or speed, but which has the life, precision
and sheer chattiness to make an Audi TT, even an Impreza, seem dull.
Do
we get modern standards of refinement? Not quite.
On the motorway, it's fine, The engine hums away in your slipstream and
wind noise is low. There's tyre
noise, but nothing the radio can't cope with.
Curiously, it's at town speeds that the P Zeros seem most grumbly, and
these are also the times you get snagged in the heavy first-to-second gear
shift. But even in urban mode
you're more than equally blessed as cursed.
Visibility is panoramic, and the car's smallness and upright driving
position make it seem more wieldy than any modern coup?.
As they do out in the country, where you can thread yourself down narrow roads in confidence that you're not going to take the side off whatever’s round the next corner. By the way, there are no airbags. But this one is pretty safe for a 12-year-old car: the 964 had an all-new floorpan, it's galvanised so it won't have rusted, and the engine block won't crunch into your legs in a crash.
While
the 964 was being developed, there was a huge power struggle going on at
Porsche, between Ferry Porsche and his allies who thought the 911 could live
forever, and a cabal who favoured the front-engined cars.
So the new 911 had to look like an old 911, and it did inside and out.
This means that silhouette, and the equally characteristic five-dial
layout in an oval frame on the dash. It
means an upright windscreen close to your nose, slim pillars, and taking aim
down the road over those bug-eye headlamps.
None of these are advantages or disadvantages on a practical level.
You can choose to call them classic or merely old.
I'd opt for the former. Unquestionably
merely old are the shambolic switchgear, the crappy-feeling air vents and the
lack of airbags (for apology, see above) and air-conditioning (again, you don't
really need it because there's no engine heat soak).
So it's practical. It's reliable and it doesn't depreciate, rust, smoke, rattle or fart. But the thing is, even if it did - at least a bit - you'd forgive it once you got behind the wheel. Honestly. This is a really scintillating drive and it upended a decade of prejudice in this author.
You
might be so risk-averse that you need, absolutely need, a warranty.
Or your company car scheme administrators might choke at the very idea of
a 12-year-old car. So I can't
unreservedly recommend the 911 option. But
there's something else. The 911 is
without a doubt the best-known sports car in history; and every-one who knows it
has an opinion about it. Those
views are strongly bipolar, so whenever a group is gathered and the subject
comes up, the debate will get lively. No
doubt you've never held back in those situations.
But if you take the plunge now, even if you get rid of the thing a year
down the line, something will have changed.
People will have to listen to what you say.
You will have become definitive.
Because you, my friend, will have owned a Porsche 911.
