Styling
With the familiar 911 shape to play with, but not obliterate nor alter out of all recognition, the German company's stylists haven't done a huge amount to change the 992.1 into the 992.2. But if you look at the Carrera for a while, even finished as RE74 UFV is in subtle GT Silver metallic paint (£1,068) and sitting on 20-inch front, 21-inch rear Carrera Classic alloys (£1,910), you can tell it's the new one without too much difficulty. It's a cleaner, more modern coupe these days, courtesy of a revised full-width rear-light strip and the five vanes sitting either side of the high-level brake lamp under the glass, while at the front the round HD-Matrix (£2,033) headlight clusters have all the necessary illumination functions within them, resulting in a larger front airdam beneath. Overall, it's patently a 911, but it's just visually arresting enough that it'll still be apparent it's a 992.2 to clued-up onlookers, even if owners fit their Carreras with the expected private plates that mask the car's registration year.
Interior
The 992's cabin architecture has always been brilliant, and whether you like the adoption of the 12.6-inch fully digital Curved Display instrument cluster - no more analogue tacho - and the round start-stop button to the right of the exquisite heated GT Sports steering wheel (£236) in the 992.2 or not, generally the material quality and ergonomic correctness of the 911's cabin is just spot on. It's a cockpit that you get into as a driver and you can immediately use all the onboard functions easily, like you've owned the Carrera for years beforehand. Separate physical climate controls, too, operated in part by little stubby versions of the razor-like shift lever for the PDK.
Obviously, the ambience of our test car was improved by the luscious black and Bordeaux Red two-tone leather upholstery (£513) complete with extended hide and a Lightsilver accent (£924), a set of 18-way electrically adjustable Adaptive Sports Seats Plus in the front (£2,825) with Porsche crests on their head restraints (£206), a Burmester High-End Surround Sound system (£3,974), and an electric slide-tilt sunroof (£1,509) that, once upon a time, might have earned this Carrera coupe the epithet of
Targa. But we think the 992.2's inherently excellent cabin will win plenty of fans, with or without a huge chunk of optional-extra cash thrown at it.
Practicality
Let's be fair, a two-door coupe in which there's a 3.0-litre twin-turbo flat-six stuffed into what would otherwise be the boot is not going to win any awards for practicality. So aside from the 135-litre cuboid cubby under the Porsche's bonnet, your main storage area comes in the back of the passenger compartment. Interestingly, on all 992.2 Coupes going forward, they will come with only two front seats as standard; if you want the vestigial '+2' chairs in the back, you must tick a specific box at ordering time (at least it's a no-cost option). UFV had the rear seats fitted, as well as lightweight and noise-insulated glass (£1,151), so it was slightly more practical than a pure two-seat Carrera would otherwise be. And you can still store stuff on the back bench if you need to, although take care not to mark the expensive leather, eh?
Performance
The Carrera remains the least-powerful model of the 992.2 family, but now there's a headline-grabbing
hybrid GTS in the line-up, the entry-level 911 gains the two turbos from the
old 992.1 GTS and the intercooler from a
capital-T Turbo to liberate an extra 9hp, taking the peak figure up to 394hp. Torque remains the same at 450Nm on the updated Carrera.
But while a 2.3 per cent lift in power might not sound much, at the end of the day the 992.2 Carrera is a twin-turbocharged sports coupe with almost 400 horses, a kerb weight little more than 1.5 tonnes... and as a result a 0-62mph time of less than four seconds (3.9 seconds) is the first time any unadorned, Carrera-badged car has even been capable of such a feat. Mind, it needs the Sport Chrono Package (£1,797) fitted to do that, putting in a 4.1-second sprint otherwise.
Still mighty quick, of course, and the Carrera's 183mph top speed hints at the healthy performance that's readily on tap here. Honestly, there's no way you could ever accuse this 911 of being slow or feeling lethargic, as the new ex-GTS blowers seem to give the Carrera a more impressive, responsive midrange, even when the car is in its most benign drive modes. It hauls hard and in linear fashion to the redline, not even drastically tailing off when you've gone past the peak point of the turbochargers' effort, and there's a lovely, snarling soundtrack to everything this 911 does - emphasised by the optional Sports exhaust system with its oval tailpipe exits finished in black (£2,249).
Further, we drove the 992.2 Carrera for more than 470 miles over the course of a few days, during which time it gave back an average economy of 26.7mpg; again, not bad for something so swift and with a six-cylinder petrol engine doing all the legwork. It'll even get into the mid-30s for mpg on a steady motorway cruise, which is where the Carrera makes the most sense: of all the 911 variants available, and as good as they all are in their own individual ways, it's the 394hp model which will be the prime choice for the everyday Porsche driver.
Ride & Handling
As standard, the Carrera comes with Porsche Active Suspension Management (PASM) adjustable dampers, but does without many of the company's further chassis-honing tools like, for instance, Rear-Axle Steering or Porsche Torque Vectoring Plus. It's also not available with a manual gearbox, the same as the 992.1 Carrera, but at odds with the next two models up the tree - these being the driver-focused
Carrera T and the more potent
Carrera S.
That, though, shouldn't put you off the Carrera. Because it's a wonderful blend of a comfortable, quiet pseudo-GT on the one hand, and a typically magnetic sports-car personality on the other. Naturally, there are machines which are quieter and suppler on the motorway than the 992.2 Carrera, but none of them have '911' badges on their forms, nor are any of them sports cars either. Unlike some of its more focused siblings, and despite the 305-section rear rubber fitted to the 21s, the Carrera doesn't suffer with anything like the sort of rowdy tyre cavitation in the back of the passenger compartment that you'd get in, say, the
Turbo S, and coupled with the low revs the engine runs at when cruising, courtesy of the eight-speed PDK's gearing, and slippery, aerodynamic shape of the narrow Carrera body, it's supreme at effortlessly eating up the miles at a steady 70mph. The PASM does just as good a job of making the 911 Carrera a breeze around town, too, and rare is the occasion you'll sense the big alloys thumping through imperfections in the road surface.
Yet, on the right road and with the car dialled up into its sharper settings, the Carrera can still remind you that rear-wheel drive is the best-wheel drive. With the marvellous calibration of the throttle pedal and the mapping of the power delivery, you can get on the power precisely when you want in the 394hp 911 when exiting a corner and it'll never come across as snappy or violent. It'll even playfully slide into oversteer, so although the impending T promises to polish this chassis set-up yet further, we're not sure how Porsche is going to make it much better than this. Absolutely sublime steering is also layered on top of the dynamic cake, while the brakes - neither PCSB nor PCCB uprated stoppers - are exceptional: strong, fade-free and operated with a good, firm pedal.
Come rain or shine, and whether you're on a deserted, well-sighted B-road, crawling through town at near-walking pace or pounding along a dark motorway at high speed, the 992.2 Carrera always excels. It's a genuinely astounding master of all trades, really.
Value
Ostensibly, the Carrera is the only 992.2 Porsche 911 you can get in for five figures. But only just - it costs £99,800 basic, which is a heaping great pile of cash for an entry-level car any way you look at it. And if you've been keeping tabs of all the figures in brackets scattered throughout this review, indicating the options fitted to UFV, then you'll be aware that our silver test car was in no way a five-figure 911.
As well as everything we've already listed, adding on the prep for a roof transport system (£51), the model designation painted in high-gloss black (£206), and then a handful of ADAS upgrades - £1,299 Surround View and Active Parking Support, £1,469 Adaptive Cruise Control and £740 Lane Change Assist - you end up with a £124,058 Carrera. Not cheap, natch. That being said, a 911
is a 911, all things considered, and there are few sports cars which can reach this German machine's dynamic heights, with many of its obvious rivals of recent years either falling out of production or elevating way out of reach in
terms of performance, so it doesn't seem stupidly exorbitant in the wider context of 2024/25 new-car prices. Many of which are breathtaking these days, for all the wrong reasons.
Verdict
The real magic of the 911, and this is especially true of the 992 generation (.1 or .2, whichever), is that there's such a disparate spread of highly desirable sports cars in one single model line-up. Coming soon to the 992.2 will be the aforementioned Carrera T, Carrera S, Turbo and Turbo S cars, while the hybrid-powered GTS is already in play. Early in 2025, we'll be driving the new, improved
GT3, with its
hardcore RS spin-off likely to follow on soon after. And that's saying nothing of special editions like the Sport Classic, S/T or
Dakar, which we've seen in the 992.1 story so far.
In and amongst all that lot, then, there's a danger the 'boggo' Carrera would get lost in the background noise. But nothing could be further from the truth. With its pliant, biddable and engaging rear-wheel-drive chassis, coupled to its mellow everyday charm and superb interior, this is a car in which every single mile is an unmitigated pleasure. So while it's different to an overtly driver-focused 911, in its own way it's every bit as mesmerisingly good. And that's why Porsche's achievements with the modern-era 992.2 are all the more extraordinary.
