Porsche’s perfect four-season sports car,
For a high-performance convertible, this roadster handles snow quite well
EDMONTON I’m doing the unthinkable. I’m testing a new Porsche Carrera 4S convertible, and I’m punishing it with heavy winter work.
The Carrera 4S Cabriolet’s natural environment should be top down in the glorious sunshine, clipping apexes on smooth ribbons of pavement lined with palm trees.
Instead, we’re bulling our way through deep snow and the temperature is -21 C. The Porsche’s front splitter (designed to keep the nose planted at 290 plus km/h) is creating a bow wave of snow as we plow along neighbourhood streets. Mother Nature has just body slammed Edmonton with a mid-November blizzard, dumping 30 centimetres of snow.
I thought Porsche folks were pranking me when they offered a Carrera 4S Cabriolet for mid-November testing. C’mon — testing a convertible? In the Prairies? In November?
But after slogging through snowclogged streets for a week, it seems there’s method in Porsche’s madness. The German company has been campaigning to convince buyers that Porsche sports cars, typically worshipped as exotics rolled out only on special days, are indeed practical daily drivers, even in Canada.
We put the Carrera 4S Cabriolet through a week’s worth of extreme, winter testing. So, how did our German super model fare? The short answer is amazingly well.
Our test unit came with what I’d consider the ‘ basics’ of a sports car intended for four-season Canadian driving: Porsche’s full-time, active all-wheel drive; high performance winter tires; heated steering wheel and front seats; and arguably the piece de resistance, the car’s magnesium roof. (The roof is covered with textile, making it look like a soft top. This is stylistic trickery that camouflages what is essentially a retractable hard top.)
The Cabriolet’s soft top-look roof has a sound-deadening fabric-covered liner, which also serves as insulation to keep the interior warm. It makes for a very quiet cabin, even at highway speed. And the roof retracts in a quick 17 seconds.
During our test period, we left the Carrera parked outdoors overnight without plugging in the block heater. At -21 C, the car fires instantly and the three-position heated seats warm quickly — they’re nice and hot within a few minutes. Surprisingly absent from the test Porsche’s arm-long list of performance electronic technologies (some of which are active suspension management, torque vectoring, stability management, traction management) is a ‘snow’ or ‘winter’ setting. (Some manufacturers provide a ‘winter’ or ‘snow’ choice on the automatic transmission, forcing second gear starts to reduce the possibility of wheelspin.)
Driving the Carrera 4S in deep snow has its challenges. The car’s low-slung undercarriage drags through deep snow, and the monstrous Pirelli Sottozero (P245 front, P305 rear) are high-performance winter tires (meaning they’re designed to perform well on wet and dry pavement as well as snow and ice), so they dig through snow competently, but the ultrawide (81/2-in. front, 11-in. rear) alloy wheels pack full of snow. The additional ballast in the 20-in. wheels causes them to be severely unbalanced, and at any speed above 60 km/h, the car shudders unhappily.
Still, the Carrera 4S performs winter duty like a good soldier. In deep snow, traction is enhanced by its grip-friendly rear weight bias, traction control and all-wheel drive. Should the driver be juvenile and apply excessive amounts of throttle to experience the joy of 400 horsepower on surfaces with little traction — and I’m not saying I did — the Carrera 4S simply squats, digs in, and accelerates in a glorious cloud of snow.
Driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic with the top up, the curvaceous Cabriolet is out of its natural habitat and makes me grumpy. The stylish, retractable roof has broad C-pillars and the rear window is small, making rear vision poor. Porsche’s (optional) ParkAssist system beeps annoyingly when pulling up behind a stopped vehicle. ( We ended up disengaging it.)
Our tester optioned out to more than $160,000 and has no blindspot warning system and no backup camera.
I didn’t expect driving the Carrera 4S Cabriolet to be any fun in our extreme winter environment, but it proved me wrong. The 400-horsepower naturally-aspirated 3.8-litre flat-six engine and PDK transmission is a brilliant combination, and arguably the best powertrain choice for Canadian (speed-regulated) driving conditions. The flatsix engine’s sonorous growl is endlessly entertaining and makes the optional ($5720) Burmeister audio system seem a perfectly good waste of money.
Our week of winter testing proved that this all-wheel-drive Porsche is virtually unstoppable and can bull its way through deep snowpack if need be.
For sports car enthusiasts who demand a pure — al fresco — driving experience and want a fourseason roadster, the Porsche Carrera 4S Cabriolet absolutely fills the bill.
OVERVIEW
The Porsche Carrera 4S Cabriolet is for the driver who demands the purest (al fresco) driving experience in a four-season-capable package
Pros: Glorious flat-six engine, lightning-fast PDK transmission, impressive all-wheel drive, quiet cabin
Cons: Price makes mortals light headed. Missing from a $160,000 car: blind-spot sensors, rear-view camera, and keyless entry/ignition. Really? Value for money: Poor What I would change: Improve rear sight lines, increase cabin storage, simplify console and centrestack controls