Porsche 911 GTS: Everything you would hope for in a car

The good news is the Porsche 911 GTS that it is absolutely worth every dollar and buying one will make your life better.

Porsche 911 GTS, Taycan.

Champagne, sex, international travel, Disneyland, driving a Porsche 911. That’s a pretty much exhaustive list of the things in life that actually turn out to be as good as you’d hoped they would be.

So here is some solid, consumer advice about buying a 911, which you really should make one of your top life goals. Walk in, ask for the entry-level cheap one, buy it and enjoy. Honestly, the base 911 Carrera, at $241,200, is all the sports car excitement you’ll ever need and you will love it dearly.

There are, of course, notionally better 911s, just as there are better overseas holidays, and you can spend double that price and then some to upgrade to a super-car-fast 911 Turbo S, if you want to. Indeed, there is a dizzying array of Porsche 911 options, with various names and engines and so forth, but again, I’m here with some vital advice. If you really want the best of the best, the sweetest spot in the range, you’ll be looking for the one with the GTS badge, and a new one has just launched in Australia (GTS stands for Gran Turismo Sport, which is meant to summarise the fact that you can drive long distances in it, and also fang it sportily around race tracks).

It features a seven-speed manual gearbox.

It is, without exaggeration, staggeringly fantastic to drive, particularly with the seven-speed manual gearbox, which reminds you why changing gears yourself connects you to a car and its engine’s feelings and expressions in a whole different, better way. Apparently the shifting action is shorter and sweeter than ever before, and the gear lever itself is 10mm shorter.

This tech-clever 911 even revs for you on down changes, but you can turn that feature off if you like to heel and toe shift yourself.

The gear lever itself is 10mm shorter.

It’s also impressively quick, and more than fast enough to keep you not just happy but thrilled on every drive for the rest of your life. The GTS is powered by twin-turbocharged 3.0-litre flat-six-cylinder petrol engine, which makes 353kW (22kW more than the previous version) and 570Nm (up 20Nm) and it is capable of smashing its way to 100km/h in a genuinely super-car-like 3.3 seconds.

Porsche’s flat-six engines are particularly wonderful because they make such unique, rasping raspberry sounds – if the engine note was a human, it would be Christopher Walken, and in the GTS some of the base 911’s insulation has been removed to make it feel even louder. It’s magnificent.

Porsche 911 GTS, starts at $314,800.

Much like champagne and Disneyland, unfortunately, a Porsche 911 is not cheap, with the rear-drive, seven-speed manual starting at $314,800 (there are more expensive versions as well, with all-wheel drive and clever paddle-shift gearboxes, but you don’t need those).

The good news is, however, that it is absolutely worth every dollar and buying one will make your life better. It really is everything you could hope for in a car.