Porsche 911 Turbo S Cabriolet 2020 UK first drive

If it wasn’t for the influence of history, there might not be a Porsche Turbo Coupé or Cabriolet any more. Back in 1975, fitting a turbocharger to a Porsche 911 and widening the body to accommodate massively bigger rear wheels was a breathtaking thing to do, but that was when ordinary 911s only had 200-and-a-bit horsepower, plus knife edge-handling that meant the extra poke would have sent them backwards through a hedge.

Nowadays, the most basic 911 has 385bhp and every 911 is turbocharged and possesses a wide body anyway. Expanding the 3.0-litre to 3.7 litres and boosting power to 641bhp for the latest Turbo suddenly looks a bit excessive to some eyes, even when the whole vehicle weighs 1700kg, but the traditional existence of a Turbo as a variety of 911 means the demand keeps rolling. 

It becomes a 205mph all-wheel-drive car with the astounding 0-62mph acceleration time of 2.8sec, mostly because of the class-beating traction of the rear-engined weight bias and the clever way the sophisticated traction control directs the right amount of torque to every wheel.

Suddenly, we have a car that can more or less match the very quickest supercars, beating them for quality (as Porsche always does) and selling from £168,127, a price that looks decent against McLarens and Ferraris of equal capability, even allowing for the barminess of Porsche’s option pricing, whereby you’re required to pay an extra £2180 for a sports exhaust, £1203 for adaptive cruise control (a gadget that comes free in many an upmarket Vauxhall) and an extra £434 for the best grade of headlight. Even so, our test car’s total of £178,414 still looks okay against others in the supercar realm.

We’ve tested the Turbo S already and found it deeply impressive. By shamelessly plundering Ricky Lane’s verdict of a couple of months ago, I can tell you that this top-end 911 is pretty close to being “the quickest car in the world” point to point, because it’s so well developed to cope with all conditions that “it’s a car you can trust”. Porsches have always been like that: drive comfortably through France with your other half to the Paul Ricard circuit, do a full-on track day when you arrive and then drive comfortably back again.

The question mark comes when you start talking about the car’s sheer performance potential. Convertibles are mainly cruisers. Fabric tops are sometimes speed limited because they can’t always stand the stresses of extreme speed. They’re usually quite a lot noisier than tin-tops, too. Surely, a Porsche Turbo Cabriolet is a bit of a weird beast, possessed of huge potential that its drop-top status discourages you from using?