Tested: 2025 Porsche 911 Carrera Punches Above Its Weight

Despite all of the various Porsche 911 permutations running around—and there are a lot of them—the base model 2025 Porsche 911 Carrera (code name: 992.2) is all the Porsche you’re likely to need. It has plenty of speed and loads of refinement in the most affordable 911 package Porsche offers.

Bigger Turbos, Even Though It’s Not the Turbo

The engine in the base 911 Carrera is a 3.0-liter flat-six with twin turbochargers. (The capital-T Turbo moniker has long since morphed from merely indicating the presence of turbocharging, instead becoming synonymous for bloody fast—thus the application of the badge to the Taycan Turbo and the Macan Turbo Electric.) For 2025, the 992.2 generation of the 911 Carrera utilizes the larger turbochargers of the previous-gen 911 GTS, with the turbine wheels upsized from 45 to 48 mm and the compressor wheels jacked up from 49 to 55 mm. It also uses the larger intercooler from the Porsche 911 Turbo. You don’t see any of this from the outside, but the new 2025 911 Carrera base engine now makes 388 horsepower instead of last year’s 379. If that doesn’t sound like a lot to you, then you need to school yourself at the track.

When you do, the run to 60 mph takes just 3.1 seconds. Keep your foot in it, and 100 mph comes in 7.8 seconds on the way to a quarter-mile that’s history in 11.4 seconds at 121 mph. These numbers are all a tenth better than the 379-hp 2020 edition we tested, which is identical to the outgoing 2024 model. The advantage grows the faster you go, with 130 mph coming in 13.5 seconds (0.5 second sooner) and 150 mph arriving in just 19.6 seconds (0.9 second quicker). This machine has top end for days, in other words. It’s a base car, but these are hardly base-car numbers. It’s worth noting that all of this was measured on California’s sorry-ass 91-octane gasoline. The prior car’s numbers were made with the Midwest’s 93-octane juice.

Back it down to sane speeds in Sport mode, and you have all the power and responsiveness you need to win the cut and thrust of daily driving. You can rip around with the optional sport exhaust system ($2960) engaged, which no longer pops like a juvenile delinquent. Likewise, you can dial up Normal mode and fade into the background, doing a credible job of “Who, me?”—especially if your car is painted Slate Grey Neo, as ours was. This is all due to the masterful performance of Porsche’s eight-speed dual-clutch transmission, which is the only choice in the base 911. If you want a manual, you must step up to the 911 Carrera T and pay $13,900 more.

Fuel economy isn’t necessarily a huge purchase consideration, but it’s impressive nonetheless. This year it is up by 1 mpg, rising from 20 mpg combined (18 city/24 highway) to 21 mpg (18 city/25 highway) despite the extra power. The old car did far better than that in our 75-mph highway test, however, netting an amazing 33 mpg. By all rights this car should do even better when we get the chance to re-run that test. Even if it hits the same 33-mpg figure as before, the extended range 22.1-gallon fuel tank ($230) could enable an insane highway range of 720 miles.

Chassis Tweaks

The steering, of course, is perfection. No matter the mode, you get stellar responsiveness and oodles of feedback, straight from the road to your fingertips. This car turns in with a directness that is virtually unmatched, and recent changes to the damper programming have removed the last bit of patter from the front end. The car no longer seems to skim the surface, instead digging in and carving a fractionally neater line. The result can be seen on the skidpad, where grip has edged up from 1.08 to 1.09 g’s. Not a big change, but this is otherworldly territory for a base car.

Overall ride comfort is also calmed a bit. The same damper tweaks that improved the steering also help the ride. The change helps equalize the difference between rebound and compression, which means the two don’t fight each other as much. As a result, it flattens out the response to bumps without actually changing the overall softness or firmness of the suspension. This is most noticeable over broken concrete surfaces, which seem to have less of a deleterious effect on the smoothness of the ride. This is especially surprising because our test car wore the optional 20- and 21-inch wheel setup ($3820) with reduced sidewall depth versus the standard 19s and 20s.

The Inside Story

Of course, our test car’s adaptive 18-way sport seats also helped the comfort quotient. That’s not to say they’re strictly necessary, because they’re not. The standard seats are some of the best going. Still, it is nice to be able to tweak them just so and save your preferences with the memory setting, although the privilege costs $3830 for the 18-way jobs. Maybe we would have appreciated the $2320 14-way seats just as much. But the biggest change to the 911’s seating package has to be the status of the flip-up rear seat. For the first time in a base Carrera, it’s a no-cost option. Our sample was equipped with said option, so we’ll still have to imagine what no seat would be like, but at least you now have the choice between a 2+2 or a mere two-seater.

Those seats were trimmed with two-tone leather that are less bland than the standard black interior. The Slate Grey/Chalk treatment was a $4960 option, but it really breathed life into an otherwise stark environment. There’s still a lot of piano black around the shifter, but now Porsche has sculpted the area to make it look less like something’s missing. We’re happy that the HVAC controls haven’t changed from the 992.1 because, well, they really work.

The biggest change to the interior is the deletion of the fixed central mechanical tachometer. Pour one out for this former feature, as the newest Carrera instead has a 12.6-inch curved screen with all relevant gauges depicted digitally. Yes, one of your choices is a central tach surrounded by gauges as before, but you can just as easily wipe this away and replace it with navigation or one of several customizable gauge displays. On balance, we guess it works out fine because you can end up with the same sort of information if you wish, but we can’t help but roll our eyes at the general digitization of the display.

One of things to watch out for is the base price, which has edged up to $122,095. For reference, the base price of a 992.1 was $116,050 last year and just $98,750 when it came out for 2020. With more than $26,000 in options—including those mentioned above, plus $2400 for the Sport Chrono package and $5240 for the Premium package—our test car came in at $148,515. That seems like a big ask, but on the other hand, the 2025 Porsche 911 Carrera punches well above its weight.

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com