The new Porsche 911 Carrera GTS T-Hybrid is pretty amazing when you think about it. It works unlike pretty much every other hybrid system on the market, using electric assistance to boost output rather than to embrace the quiet glide of an electric motor around town. Unfortunately, sports cars like a 911 are often occasional drivers, and this powertrain doesn’t seem to be set up optimally for what that use case might entail.
First, some background on what makes the new GTS trim special. A flywheel motor augments a 3.6-liter flat-six with an electrified turbocharger to crank out a combined 532 horsepower and 449 lb.-ft. of torque, resulting in a real-world zero-to-60 mph time in the mid-twos, modern emissions compliance, and a relatively modest 60-pound weight penalty. Better yet, the 1.9 kWh high-voltage battery pack sits in the normal battery tray, meaning you aren’t giving up any trunk space.
However, if you want to tuck your new 911 Carrera GTS T-Hybrid or 911 Targa GTS T-Hybrid away for an extended period of time, there are some precautions you should be aware of. I went poking through the owner’s manual and found these precautions listed, which led Matt to say that the car is “basically a Dracula.” You’ll see what he means.
Notes on leaving the vehicle unused for long periods
For idle periods of two weeks or longer:
- Do not park the vehicle with a discharged high-voltage battery.
- Make sure that the vehicle is not permanently exposed to direct sunlight. We recommend that you park the vehicle in a covered garage.
- Make sure that the vehicle is in an ambient temperature of between approx. 32 °F (0 °C) and 68 °F (+20 °C).
- If possible, check the battery charge regularly to make sure that the battery charge does not fall below 30%. If the charge level of the high-voltage battery falls below a defined threshold value, the emergency starting can only be carried out by a Porsche Center.
For idle periods of two months:
-
Run high-voltage battery for several minutes in SPORT PLUS drive mode before parking the vehicle to charge the high-voltage battery to above 80%.
There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s start from the top. Obviously, letting anything with a battery sit discharged for a while isn’t great for battery health, whether we’re talking about an iPod Shuffle or a car. Ever try to power up one of your old mobile phones for nostalgia’s sake, only to find it doesn’t hold a charge?
However, the next few clauses seem absurd. If you’re parking your 911 Carrera GTS T-Hybrid for two weeks or more, you can’t leave it in direct sunlight and can’t let it get too hot or too cold. Probably not the best machine to leave at the airport while away on a two-week holiday, then. However, even if you take sunlight out of the equation, many residential garages get above 68 degrees Fahrenheit in summer and, if you live far enough north, below 32 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks in the winter. This seems like a tricky limitation for those who store their cars out of the snow in winter, but it’s fixable with climate-controlled storage. The next item? Not so much.
Basically, whether you’re leaving the new 911 Carrera GTS T-Hybrid parked for two weeks or two months, the state-of-charge on the hybrid battery must stay above 30 percent as per Porsche’s instructions. So what about just throwing the 911 Carrera GTS T-Hybrid on a trickle charger? Well, that will keep the 12-volt battery topped off, but it’s not going to feed the high-voltage pack. Even if it could, Porsche’s own trickle charger, along with many on the market, has a maximum DC output of 14.7 volts and five amps. That’s 73.5 watts, not nearly enough to provide meaningful juice to a high-voltage hybrid battery pack.
While it is totally possible to idle the engine in Sport Plus mode to replenish charge, idling without driving requires a bit of care. Not only should the space you start the car in be well-ventilated to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning, you also need to ensure the oil reaches a hot enough operating temperature to get rid of condensation. Ever lift the oil cap on a car that’s done a lot of short trips to find milky residue under the cap? That’s an effect of condensation in the oil.
Now, if you ignore these precautions and let the state-of-charge in the hybrid battery pack get critically low, there’s a chance you won’t be able to start your 911 Carrera GTS T-Hybrid. That’s because it uses the high-voltage electric motor inside the bellhousing to start the engine instead of a traditional 12-volt starter motor. This means that instead of a traditional jump-start, you’ll be calling a flatbed to take your car to the dealer for an emergency start. I suspect this is partly why models like the McLaren Artura and Ferrari 296 GTB are plug-in hybrids. They’re occasional-use cars, and if electrification is the solution to meeting both performance targets and emissions targets, why not let these cars be topped off from the mains?
There is one solution to managing the high-voltage battery charge in the 992.2 Porsche 911 Carrera GTS T-Hybrid, however, and that’s by making it your daily driver, and throwing the keys to trusted close friends and family when you go on vacation. Sure, if you live in a place that salts the roads, winter will treat the underbody with indiscriminate hostility, you will get rock chips, and there’s a chance you won’t end your ownership period with a clean Carfax, but do you know what they call the person with the most mileage on their sports car? A hero.
Top graphic image: Porsche
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God forbid you feed the car after midnight or get water on it.
EV is supposed to be less maintenance than ICE
Porsche: hold my beer
You know, that makes sense. The heat is what killed all the (kept outside) Leafs in California.
Porsche left off the most important rule:
most EVs probably have similar requirements for long term storage. Volvo lists: Keep in a cool place or shade, have the battery charged in the 40-60% range, etc
I wonder if making it a plug-in hybrid would change some legal classification for the car. Because it sound like there’s no other reason to not install a HV charging port.
68 °F max temperature??
It’s warmer than that in my office right now by about 10 degrees.
Are these “requirements” because of the battery location? Or why Toyota is not that particular with this? If you have Porsche money that means you have some sort of garage available.
Hybrids rule! ICE DROOLS!
Do the happy owners have to tuck their hybrid Porsches in at night? Read them bedtime stories?
I’m not really seeing the insane here. If you aren’t going to drive it, then check the charge every couple weeks, top it up first if you’ll be parking it longer. The only thing that really gives me pause is keeping it below 68°, which to me sounds EXTREMELY cold for a garage of any kind– I don’t even let my house get that cold– but maybe even that’s no big deal for someone in this car’s target demographic.
Geez, as a Phoenician these are impossibly low numbers. My garage self-heats to 120°+ this time of year.
Just provide an HV charger for God’s sake. I expect most that can afford these new have climate controlled garages. It will the the second/third owners for whom things will get interesting.
From experience… open garage door, idle for ~40 minutes. After its warmed up a fair bit (oil temp > 150F), put it in neutral and cycle in some sustained load. Like, bring it to 2000 to 3000 rpm, let it sit and fluctuate in that range a bit, back to idle, repeat.
When you turn it off, usually want the oil temp above 190F. Even the spiciest stuff they sell, driving it around very casually, it usually sits around 190-195F.
Though yes, this is enough to prevent condensation in the oil and exhaust pipes. This only needs to be done about every 4 weeks or so.
In other words Porsche is telling you to drive the car instead of being a garage queen
well, unless it’s over 70 out, then you should strap your portable AC to it.
Fail. This is ridiculous. More German overengineering.
This will be interesting for any Porsche dealer that deals with winter climates. Unless they plan to have them on the lot for less than 2 weeks at all times.
There’s not a ton of 911s sitting on most Porsche lots, and for where I’d expect to see enough of them, they’d be in warmer climates to begin with.
Around where I am, 911 GTSes would be a small subset of the few 911s they might have in inventory, so they’d just likely be parked in the showroom.
My understanding is that basically all the special 911s are custom order or dealer trade these days. If you happen to have one in stock it’s on the showroom floor behind a velvet rope, away from the Macan-buying plebs.
911 GTSes aren’t “special” 911s.
Of all the sports cars Porsche sells in the US, only about 1 in 3 are custom ordered last I checked (2023), the others are ordered by the dealership to put on the floor, usually with popular options that may or may not also be higher margin options.
Well, the ambient temperature in my garage is like 100 degrees for half the year, so no GTS for me. I guess I’ll just have to get a GT3 instead.
I can confirm hero status for daily driving a Porsche sports car. The indie shop near me and the dealer both treat me differently. And also complain about people flat towing their cars in for service.
It’s possible I’m misunderstanding the instructions, but it seems like for long term storage, they just want you to charge the battery to above 80% before putting the car away. Presumably that ensures it degrades to no lower than 30% over the winter, with no trickle charger needed.
I’m also not understanding the issue with the climate-controlled storage; possessing an attached garage is not a big hurdle for most buyers of a $150,000+ automobile. Anything on summer tires shouldn’t be stored under 32 degrees anyways. This isn’t some kind of new requirement; there’s a reason I keep the Viper in the garage in the winter and not in the barn.
This article seems to be applying shitbox ownership logic to a premium new sports car.
Except that many people have, and will continue to, buy a Porsche 911 as a daily. It will not be possible to use it in the winter if you can’t leave it parked in freezing temps.
You can, just not for multiple weeks without starting and running it to recharge the battery. Really only seems like an issue for stored cars.
Things have largely progressed past that point, and quite some time ago.
Now, stuff like Cup 2s or Cup 2 Rs? Yes, no sustained time in cold.
Something like a Pilot Sport 4S? PZero Z24s? They’re fine. I’ve been doing it for the better part of 20 years at this point. Now, I do put the car on Flatstopper ramps to prevent flatspotting, and I do roll it around a bit as well to further prevent any flatspotting. However, I do thoroughly inspect after winter, and especially after the first few post-winter drives, but most modern sports car tires are fine so long as your service life for the tire is 5 years or less from date of manufacture.
A lot of this is we’re in multi-compound tires anyways. The soft bit is more the outer tread blocks, where the inner is much more all-seasony.
The main issue of summer tires in actual cold temps is cold tires are cold. You have less grip than an all-season. You have to respect it, especially longer braking distances. Though in -5F air temps (-25F wind chill on highways) I’ve done the Christmas morning trip on Pilot Sport 4Ses for many years, and they’re fine.
Fair clarification. I had stuff like the former in mind as it’s what I run on the Viper.
What do you get for tire life out of the sticker stuff?
I got maybe 7K miles out of the rears for Pilot Sport 4Ses on a 981 Spyder, which was only 310lb-ft through 265s. Mind you, of my usual tomfoolery, 70% of the miles are cruising to “get to the fun roads” to really go nuts with it.
I’d only do “hero tires” if I was doing track days on the regular, and I’d probably have separate wheels to have them on. Otherwise I feel like I’d have to replace the tires nearly every year. So +25% cost for tires, and then replacing them at least twice as often. Right now it’s 330lb-ft through 295 rears, and with pipes and the thing set up for actual track work, it’d be 345-350lb-ft through 305 rears.
That and detached garage. No heat. It can be 10-15F warmer/cooler over just being completely outside, but for “hero tires” I’d need to either put the car up on a Bendpak QuickJack with the wheels off (stored in home), or second set.
10k miles more or less. Pirelli Corsa Systems. This set I’ll replace for age rather than miles as being more of a family man limits my opportunities to drive the car (and really limits track driving).
I bought an extra set when they went on clearance a while back, and they are now discontinued, so I’ll need to get something else next time.
They do make the PS4S in Viper sizes now, and I have them on my Blackwing, so I might just go with the same thing.
Covered garage recommended. Oh, you don’t have a semi-detached and fully climate-controlled insulated garage? No Parsh for you! You come back, one year!
We could call this character the “Car Stickler” or maybe something a little catchier.
I mean, I have one of those. But I store a 320k mile 80s Mercedes in it.
Out of all the requirements, the temperature one is the most egregious.
My uncle in Phoenix had a 300k+ 1981 300D, and it definitely lived in the garage.
My first couple of Southern US summers with (modern) German cars made us all joke about how all their plastics and adhesives were made only for a German climate. Colder? It breaks. Warmer? It sags.