Quote:
wushuhsu said:
That's the problem! The 911 is no longer that car.
You are making the rather common mistake of obsessing solely upon statistics and the associated hype.... and blowing-off/ignoring the car's intangibles and nuance and quality and styling and integration and driving feel and fun-factor and heritage. What I'm getting at is, the whole of the damn car itself!!
The stat page is just numbers, which is very important... But what I've learned from the multitudes of different cars I've owned and driven is that a hot stat sheet does not alone make a memorable ownership, or pull gravity away from an icon.
All most any kid does when he pulls a magazine off the rack at the Piggly Wiggly with a new hot machine on the cover is fervently race to the article, find the stat sheet, and go "holy-cow, it does blah in blah blah and pulls blah g's in blah!!!!!!!!!!!".... And the more aggressive the styling, the more the kid stares at it agape as if touching the thing would vaporize a limb of his body...
It's an appeal to the most primal instincts we have...
I like to think, and it's not a matter of snobbery (as I have a solid record on here of exposing snobishness and pinky-wagging), the Porsche customer is looking far beyond the empirical data we obsessed over when we were kids...
And can we all not ADMIT that when we were kids, no matter what our background (I came from a straight-middle-class family with a dad who was obsessed with strictly American iron), when we saw a 911 on a magazine cover, or rolling down the street, we never knew or really cared what the STATS were.... We just knew that we wanted one someday, period...
And as we grew older and started reading-up, and asking around, we found that it wasn't just that the car was a star performer, it was the whole package, the way it drove, the way it felt and the way it looked inside and out that we fell in love with. The stat sheet was always there, but whether it was ahead or a tad behind the rest of the pack never really jostled our desire to own the car...
When I drive my 997S today, I see kids react the SAME EXACT WAY I did when I was that age.... No clue as to how or where the car lands within the current "pecking-order" of stat sheets and techno-gizmos... No clue at all... Just a blank stare of admiration, lust and desire. And this one solitary question that I get every time a youngster has the gumption to ask me... "How fast does it go??"
You see, he was in love before he even had the slightest idea what the car would do...
Pull next to a kid in a GT-R, and honestly, I don't think you'll get that same gaze. IF they've read about it, they'll be excited because they know it's fast. But if they've never heard of it or seen it before, it'll just be some odd lump of metallic origami sitting next to them at the light. They'll stare at it for it's SHOCK VALUE, but won't likely relate to whatever may succeed it 20 years later when they can afford to buy something... Nope, they'll stare at it for the same reason they stare at an auto accident, or a building on fire, or a mechanized Godzilla that spews fire and eats junk cars at Monster Truck events...
The 911 is just as much the icon as it's always been, maybe more.... The GT-R is just a new freak on the block, it's punk rock, it's grunge. Sticking out, making noise, dropping jaws, shifting the paradigm a bit, and then it slowly is engulfed and absorbed into culture as folks await this next new "new".
I've used this analogy before... Remember Woody Allen's "Sleeper"? Remember the "Orgasmatron"? The Nissan GT-R is a cutting-edge Orgasmantron.... The 911 is a real woman. The Orgasmatron may have better stats, but honestly, is that your idea of "iconic"? Is that what you aspire to?
. A 911 earned a big part of the market because of the chassis, reliability, everyday use, track performance and POWER/WEIGHT ratio... Also one more thing. a 997 S replaces the 996 GT3. And a 996 GT3 was never the fastest car on a straight line. But if you track it... It's always going to remind you of what you've driven...
Your either going to die or loose your license.
