20 years of 997: manual v PDK GTS
There are four of us having lunch in Palm Springs, California, discussing how we’ll buy one of the cars we’ve just been driving. It’ll need to be more affordable, which means waiting a few years until prices bottom out thanks to depreciation, but everyone around the table is committed to working out how, in a few years, they’ll own one.
That was November 2010. Our small group of motoring journalists were sat in sunnier climes because it was the launch of the Porsche 911 Carrera GTS. As one of them, I can categorically say that not one of us has a Carrera GTS in the garage, which is regrettable but understandable, because the 997 GTS never did depreciate – at least to a level that made it affordable to experience-rich but cash-poor writers.
The desire was strong after driving it, yet travelling out to the launch there was some scepticism among us. Would the Carrera GTS be worth the extra money that Porsche was asking for it? There was a whiff of clearing the decks, as if the company had a stock of extra parts it wanted to shift before it committed the production line to the 991 (The new car’s launch was almost
