Styling
The 911 Turbo S Coupe doesn't seem to suffer from the slightly apologetic front-three-quarter appearance we mentioned with the Cabriolet, although it probably helps that 911 HUL is finished in spectacular Lugano Blue, complete with the SportDesign Package 911 Turbo painted in gloss black. All that, plus the Turbonite-rendered details (including the 20-inch front, 21-inch rear alloys) and the telltale yellow callipers of the standard-fit Porsche Ceramic Composite Brakes (PCCB), culminates in one phenomenally good-looking car, which subtly but purposefully signals its intent to all and sundry with its quietly aggressive aesthetics. The great news? Lugano Blue is a no-cost option on the 992.2 Turbo S T-Hybrid. The bad news? The SportDesign Package is a whopping £5,659. Umph.
Interior
An interior every bit as fabulous as any other 992's passenger compartment, and indeed the one found in the related Turbo S Cab, can be found in this 911 Coupe, although the obvious change here is that you can't open the passenger compartment up to the elements. However... that's not strictly true with this specific demonstrator, which has been optioned with the £1,510 electrically operated slide-and-tilt sunroof. It's a body-coloured metal panel, rather than made of glass, but rolling it back on the button provides a lovely, airy cabin ambience, one that can be sustained at all road speeds; and it's kind of like that weird period in the history of the
Targa, when - through the 993 to 997 generations - that heritage badge meant nothing more than 'sliding glazed roof'.
Other points to note inside 911 HUL (incidentally, one of the most famous 911 UK press plates and usually reserved for the various iterations of Turbo, although the Cab we tried back in March wore OPR 911 instead) include the extended leather packages. One, called Club Leather Basalt Black with Interior Package Turbonite, will set you back £1,464. The other, Dashboard and Door Trim Package Leather, is a further £2,044. They were some pretty expensive cows which laid down their lives for these features, then.
And a few other items should be mentioned here as well. The Burmester High-End Surround Sound System is a stonking piece of kit and something we'd happily option ourselves (if those mythical numbers ever come in, as that's the only way we could hope to afford a brand-new 992.2 Turbo S), even though it comes in at £2,752. But a surround-view camera system with active parking support (£1,298) and adaptive cruise control (£1,498) are not only two items we think really ought to be standard kit on a car which costs 900 quid shy of 200 grand in the first place, but they're hefty prices for such technology as well. Tsk. Front-seat ventilation (£914) was a boon, mind, given we tested the Turbo S Coupe for a handful of days at the start of The Most Relentlessly And Searingly Hot UK Summer On Record.
Practicality
Although inherently a (slightly) more practical machine than many of its mid-engined supercar rivals, no Porsche 911 is a paragon of versatility, and so the 992.2 Turbo S Coupe proves. Again, the test car was fitted with the rear seats, which are an option but at least one which costs the owner zero pence.
It also had the lifting system for the front axle (£2,033) equipped, which is a godsend at preventing nasty grounding-out incidents when the front splitter is that jutting. Brilliantly, the lifting system has a feature whereby, when you manually activate it, the infotainment asks you if you'd like to memorise that specific location for future reference - and if you tap the box to confirm, then (as long as road speeds are low enough to permit its activation) the lifting system operates automatically at that same point from then on. Beautiful work from Zuffenhausen.
But even though, on volume claims alone, you've theoretically got more boot space (389 litres total) in this Turbo S than you'd have in a
Mk8 Volkswagen Golf, more than half of that cargo capacity (261 litres) cited by Porsche is made up of the cabin area behind the front seats. Given the back chairs are so vestigial in a 911 Coupe, this is no bad thing in and of itself, but actually accessing that zone with bulky items and cases and the like is not the most straightforward task in the world. Certainly not if you don't like the idea of risking damage to the three-and-a-half-grand's worth of animal hide you've plastered throughout the Porker's cabin. So you'll basically be resorting to the familiar cuboid 'frunk/froot' beneath the bonnet of the Turbo S, which is rated at just 128 litres.
Performance
We drove the Cabriolet version of the Turbo S back in spring on some of our favourite roads in the North Wessex Downs and were utterly gobsmacked by its sheer all-around-the-rev-counter ferocity. We then, for reasons too long to explain, got another thrash in a German-registered example of the 711hp T-Hybrid Cab, on the Autobahn between Stuttgart and Munich while attending the international launch of the
Cayenne Coupe Electric in late May. This included prolonged periods of 260km/h-plus running, hood down. That's 161mph, in old money.
Mention of that Cayenne Electric is apt, because the
technically misnomered Turbo range-topper of that SUV reordered our thinking about explosive performance: when you've felt the full hit of an 1,156hp/1,500Nm EV, you heartily believe little else could ever hope to live up to it. And, even more recently, we've also been behind the wheel of
something electric and Chinese with comfortably more than double the horsepower of what is, when all's said and done, the most-powerful production Porsche 911 to ever hit the public streets.
What all this waffling is building up to, though, is that in this contextual framework, you might expect us to have become somewhat, well,
inured to the speed of the T-Hybrid-enhanced Turbo S by now. The truth is quite the opposite. Not a bit of it. Seriously, this 911 is outrageous. The midrange, in particular, is absolutely scandalous. The merest flexes of your right ankle on the motorway need to be extremely carefully monitored, lest you blast through one of those camera-toting gantries on the M1 at the sort of speeds that would normally be associated with escape velocity.
Porsche is well known for sandbagging when it comes to its printed stats. If you compare the 992.2 T-Hybrid's data with that of the
992.1 Turbo S Coupe, you'll see all that has happened is peak power has gone up by 61hp - an increase of about 9 per cent. But, if anything, increased exposure to the powertrain of this new one has us more convinced than ever that there's some subterfuge going on here, certainly when it comes to torque. The T-Hybrid just has masses and masses and masses of thumping go, any engine and road speed you like, any gear. It's essentially a bright blue land missile mounted on a set of Pirelli P Zeros.
What you might have already reasonably surmised is that 711hp and 800Nm (yes, Stuttgart, and the
rest, if you please...) don't do an awful lot beneficial for fuel economy, hybrid gear be damned. Even at 85 kilos lighter than the Cab, the 992.2 Turbo S Coupe is still the far side of 1.7 tonnes, so the fact a twin-turbo 3.6-litre flat-six petrol in such an application likes a drink should come as a surprise to precisely nobody. On a steady motorway run, you might get mid- to high-20s from it - we saw 27.1mpg on one trek. Across the course of the entire 423-mile test, though, our overall average return was 22.4mpg. Proof, 'twere needed, that the T-Hybrid gear is not there for any sort of ecological reason whatsoever. It's purely to boost the scintillating performance of the Turbo S.
Oh, and final quick note: the PCCB system is faultless. Pedal feel, bite, tireless and monstrous retardation - these brakes have the lot.
Ride & Handling
In the now-age-old debate amongst Porschephiles, in which the Turbo is always pitted against the
GT3, then sure - we'll admit the Turbo S T-Hybrid, for all its undeniable talents and brilliance, isn't quite as edifying as the 4.0-litre, high-revving, nat-asp screamer. This Coupe or the sublime
911 GT3 S/C? We'd take the car with 201 fewer horses, every single time.
But that shouldn't detract from what a comprehensively fantastic thing the 911 Turbo S Coupe is these days. Every scintilla of dynamic excellence demonstrated by the Cab back in March is preserved here, only sharpened and heightened by the greater torsional rigidity of the Coupe's bodyshell and the lower kerb weight of the vehicle overall. Yes, there's a lengthy discussion to be had about the morality (or otherwise) of actually working and extending this glittering chassis to its outer limits on public roads, given the speeds you'd need to be doing in order to achieve such a thing, yet thankfully the Turbo S is special to drive when you're not caning it to within an inch of its life. The majestic steering, the peerless damping, and the sensational body and wheel control all add up to a magnificent machine in the round. Is it as much fun as a 911 GT3? No. But is it better in the corners than 99.999 per cent of similar cars from rival manufacturers? Yes.
So let's finish this section with great news on the rolling refinement front. The 992.1 family was often plagued by excessive road roar, amplified by cavitation in the back of the Coupe's fixed-roof frame. And the 650hp Turbo S was one of the worst afflicted in the entire portfolio. However, we suspected in the 992.2 T-Hybrid Cabriolet that Porsche had made great strides in this regard, and this Coupe has gone and verified our inkling. You can't ever truly eradicate tyre chatter, and especially so when your rear rubber measures up at a stonking 325-section, but the rowdy rumbling that was previously generated at higher speeds on rougher tarmac in hard-topped 992.1s has been significantly reduced for the updated car. This, along with the sumptuousness of the dampers in the PASM chassis, makes the 911 Turbo S a far superior pseudo-GT than its immediate forebear, a thoroughly relaxing thing in which to cover sizeable distances in one hit. As long as you can resist the temptation of its nuclear powertrain, of course.
Value
We've already listed all the cost options, bar one, that Porsche's press team fitted to 911 HUL, and the item missing is preparation for roof-transport system at £51. Tot all of the prices in this piece up and lob them on top of the £199,100 starting figure, and that's how you get to the point where this 992.2 Turbo S T-Hybrid Coupe comes in at £218,797 altogether. Whether you think that's a reasonable ticket or vastly over-inflated asking from the Germans will depend on whether you fully buy in to the megalomania engendered by the T-Hybrid drivetrain of this car, or if you're the sort of pragmatist who can see that a nicely specified
992.2 Carrera T would give you an almost-as-satisfying ownership experience for a lot less moolah.
Verdict
We always used to recommend specifying your Porsche 911 Turbo as a Cabriolet, because we - like many others - felt it was a car all about the sheer numbers, yet one lacking the last few degrees of kinematic finesse. So it didn't matter if you picked the soft-top, because that didn't spoil the Turbo's character one bit.
Yet here we are in a most bizarre place in later 2026 - a place where the GT3, a track-biased and free-spinning gem of a car, is arguably better in road trim as a Cabriolet, while we think you should definitely get the Turbo S as a Coupe. Because this 711hp rocketship is a quite dazzling piece of work from Porsche, and comfortably, demonstrably the finest 911 Turbo S yet seen. In the world of the ultimate forced-induction
neun-elfer this side of a GT2, normal service has been resumed: unequivocally, Coupe > Cabriolet.
