Porsche 911 review

Everyone likes to do the sums over owning a 911 – it’s the sports car we all aspire to because it’s almost accessible and we reckon running costs will be largely doable. It's not cheap because, well, it’s a 911, but it's predictable. Strong residuals help the lease cost, and if you're buying privately it's always good to know you'll find a buyer for it at the end.

The base price is now £99,800, so if you avoid almost every box on the options list, you can still have a 911 Carrera for under £100,000. It’ll come with more standard equipment than before too including Matrix LED headlights, ambient lighting, heated seats and steering wheel, ParkAssist with a reversing camera, traffic sign recognition, lane keep assist and other active safety tech.

And yet, there’s absolutely no way that you’re going to avoid tipping into six figures. Anything other than white, black or grey paint costs at least £1,700, while bigger 20- and 21-inch wheels are £1,300 minimum. Adaptive cruise control is £1,469 and you can upgrade to a BOSE surround sound system with 12 speakers for £1,223 or to a Burmester 3D 13-speaker system for £3,974. The full Aerokit with its fixed rear wing, new front spoiler and sporty side skirts is £4,857.

If you’re not careful you could spec a 911 Carrera up towards the entry-level price of a GTS. That starts at £135,834. And yes, we’re talking coupe only here: the Cabriolet and Targa models command a £10,000 premium. The Targa is currently only available as a GTS, so that’s £150k before options. You might think it looks cool, but try before you buy – we’ve always preferred the full cabrio. Want some further guidance? We ran an almost completely optionless gen 1 992 Carrera as a long-termer a couple of years back and loved it.

The warranty is three years, and it has no mileage limit. Oh, and if you’re thinking that the hybrid GTS will sip fuel like a Prius, we have some bad news for you: Porsche reckons the whole system saves around 3g/km in emissions. The rear-wheel drive GTS claims a maximum WLTP figure of 26.9mpg and at least 239g/km of CO2. The standard Carrera can claim 27.7mpg and 232g/km. Might as well have the one with the extra 145bhp, no?