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Pros: rewarding to drive in all circumstances
Cons: it’s not cheap, only two seats as standard
Porsche 911 Carrera T Design
While all Porsche 911s have a familiar basic form these days, the Carrera T has a slightly retro look thanks to standard graphics which run along the bottoms of its doors. This is topped off with Vanadium Grey for the door mirrors and the 20-inch front, 21-inch rear alloy wheels, which give the car a purposeful appearance. There are then a few details which play on the T’s USP, which is that it is now one of only two 911 models you can have with a traditional three-pedal manual gearbox set-up - the other being the hard-to-acquire GT3.
This makes the Carrera T a ‘GT3-lite’, of sorts, and so there are stickers with a manual gearbox pattern on each of the car’s side-rear windows. This graphic is then repeated if you option up puddle lights in the door mirrors, and there are more manual-transmission related details inside. Overall, the Porsche 911 Carrera T looks magnificent in this coupe body (a Cabriolet is also available but makes less sense for a driver-focused car like this) and it really suits some of the bolder colours the German company offers.
Porsche 911 Carrera T Interior
That ‘this car is a manual’ theme continues within, where the exterior glass graphic is repeated, admittedly in a more discreet style, on the passenger-side dashboard. There is also a small ‘MT’ plaque at the base of the six-speed gearbox’s lever, which is topped off with an open-pore wood knob.
Beyond that, and some fillets of body-coloured trim to enliven proceedings, the Carrera T has the usual exemplary 911 interior, complete with excellently integrated and up-to-date technology, superb positioning of its major controls and switchgear, and a really high standard of interior material finishing. Like all updated eighth-generation 911 Coupes, the T does not come with the small rear seats as standard unless you tick a (no-cost) option box at ordering time; if you don’t do that, a carpeted area in the back of the passenger compartment serves as a 373-litre ‘boot’.
Porsche 911 Carrera T Performance & Drive
The Carrera T shares the same powertrain as the least-powerful and least-expensive model in the range, the ‘basic’ Carrera. That means a 3.0-litre twin-turbocharged flat-six petrol engine delivers up to 394hp and 450Nm, which – along with rear-wheel drive and the six-speed manual transmission – results in the slowest-accelerating 911 on sale right now: it takes the Carrera T a relatively glacial 4.5 seconds to go from 0-100km/h.
Tongue firmly in cheek, there, because obviously the T is massively rapid and more than swift enough for anyone’s reasonable needs. It has loads of torque and a willingness to rev, and it sounds marvellous in that gravelly voiced Porsche way, thanks to the standard fitment of a sports exhaust on this model.
However, the real magic of the Carrera T is not in the bare numbers of its performance, but rather the way it drives. With its low weight of less than 1.5 tonnes, drive going exclusively to the rear axle, some wondrous steering which controls all four wheels (Rear Axle Steering is standard-fit on the T, when it isn’t available at all on the Carrera source material), an uprated Porsche Active Suspension Management Sport chassis with its 10mm-lower ride height and first-class body control, and an agility and adjustability in the corners that marks it out above pretty much all of its competition, when you’re driving the Carrera T you’ll inevitably have a huge grin on your face.
The star attraction is stirring that wood-topped gear lever about the gate, because it has a wonderful feel and heft in the palm of your hand, while the throw action of the gearbox is pleasingly mechanical and rewarding. Few sports cars, including other, more-powerful variants of the 911 itself, drive as sweetly as this Carrera T.
Porsche 911 Carrera T Pricing
The Porsche 911 Carrera T Coupe costs from €224,120 at the time of writing, which places it closer to the 480hp Carrera S (€232,950) than it is to the entry-level Carrera (€206,750). That said, it drives better than either of those cars, is the only one which comes with the manual gearbox, and it also has various items of kit – like its trick suspension and four-wheel steering, among more – which cannot be fitted to the Carrera no matter how much money you try to spend at ordering time. And for the singular, remarkable driving experience it delivers, then the Carrera T is almost something of a bargain; you’d need to go for a full-on and much more impractical supercar to get something which steers appreciably better than this lithe 911.
In one final attempt at cost mitigation, the Carrera T can be surprisingly economical when you drive it gently, achieving around 8.1 litres/100km on a long motorway run. For a near-400hp sports car like this, that’s an astounding return.
Carzone Verdict
The immediate two predecessors of the new Porsche 911 Carrera T were very, very good cars, but they just missed that last little bit of ‘something’ which would mark them out as great. However, a contextual shift for the current T – it now being the only manual 911 you can realistically dream of owning, unless your name is already on the very short list for a GT3 – and the deployment of a much crisper-shifting six-speed manual, in place of the clunky old seven-speed unit, has transformed this into arguably the model pick of the entire 911 range. It’s a sublime sports car and it delivers driving sensations that are hard to match anywhere else in the automotive world, at any price.