Porsche 911 Advice

If you’re a man - particularly a married one with kids and decades between you and your single days - hearing “bachelor pad” might be ever so slightly bittersweet, but there’s also every chance those words make you remember a time in your life when you were so footloose and fancy free you were basically Kevin Bacon.

Porsche doesn’t offer ‘capped-price servicing’ in the traditional sense, but it does offer indicative service pricing for each service for some of its models.The brand also offers a behind-the-pace three-year and unlimited kilometre warranty, one of only a handful of remaining brands in the Australian market to resist adopting the accepted five-year and unlimited kilometre standard. Terms and pricing are less standardised across its range of vehicles. The more mainstream models, like the Macan SUV, for example, have a schedule of service costs available on the Porsche website or via individual dealer sites, but the brand’s more enthusiast-focused models, like the 911 and Taycan, do not.Servicing for models which do have schedules is not cheap. To take a 2.0-litre turbocharged Macan as an example, servicing costs between $795 and $1500 per visit, for a five-year average of $1077 per annual visit. The Panamera and 718 Boxster/Cayman are similar, but every second service jumps to $895 making the average yearly cost even higher at $1137. Interestingly the price stays the same according to the calculator regardless of whether a 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine or a six-cylinder engine is chosen.Most Porsche models require servicing every 12 months or 15,000km, but the 911 requires servicing every 10,000km. Meanwhile, the fully electric Taycan requires servicing every two years or 30,000km.Additionally, the Taycan has a separate battery warranty, covering eight years or 160,000km.In summary: Porsche’s servicing is expensive and not particularly transparent and its warranty is behind the times in the Australian market 4/10If you want to find out more about a specific manufacturer's capped price servicing, please see below:

The Porsche 911 GT3 is among the most hardcore of the 911 sports car range, doing away with comfort and luxury in favour of on-track performance. 

A key part of “celebrity life” is having a garage heaving with expensive, exotic cars to maintain that image of wealth and success. Sports stars, musicians, actors, fashion designers and others in the glitterarti have plenty of pesos in the bank to fund a lavish lifestyle, and a few of them have spent their hard-earned building seriously cool collections of cars.

Why are so many willing to pay so much for so few obvious benefits? Most of us don't shell out six-figure sums for a car, but plenty of people do, and you have to wonder why.Is it simply because they can, because a car is a highly visible status symbol that can make you feel, and look, wealthier every day? It's exceedingly difficult to drag your giant house down to the golf-club car park after all.Sadly this theory probably holds some water, or some overpriced champagne, but the fact is that expensive cars - not all, but some - really do feel special to drive. Whether they're worth the money Australians have to pay for them is another debate entirely, but something like a Porsche 911 has a kind of engineering purity, a sense of build quality and teutonic tactility, that elevates driving, even in traffic, to a different level of joy.But you can get nearly all of that joy for less, in a $112,090 Cayman, too.Similarly, a BMW M4 feels and sounds special, with muscular steering and spine-whacking acceleration, as you would hope it should for $156,900, but much of that sheer driving pleasure DNA can also be felt in a 435i Coupe, for $108,500, or even a 420i at a comparatively bargain priced $69,500.The extra performance of the M4 is something you'll only rarely appreciate, unless you own a race track, so spending the extra is hard to justify this side of showing off.The good news however, is that much of this seemingly ephemeral and expensive driving joy can be had for far less money, once you convince yourself to be blind to badges.Behold our list of champagne cars for craft-beer money So, you think you can't afford a super car?Sure you might need to sell an organ or two, but the incredible Alfa Romeo 4C - with the looks of a Ferrari, the racing snarl of a Maserati and the all-carbon-fibre construction of a Lamborghini - brings the supercar dream down to an almost attainable level, with its launch price tipped to be around the $80,000 mark.It feels like we've been waiting forever for this car to arrive in Australia, although Alfa says it's definitely almost nearly here, but that's because world demand has been berserk. And building an F1-like carbon-car takes time.How Alfa has managed to make this super-light (just 895kg), super-handling and seriously quick car - 0 to 100km/h arrives in a Porsche-worrying 4.5 seconds - to market at a price less than six figures is some kind of Italian economic miracle. Perhaps they've fiddled the books.Best of all, it looks so good you wouldn't be surprised if it cost a million dollars.Truly super value. A not-so-poor-man's PorscheThe last Volkswagen Golf GTI, the Mk VI, was such a great driver's car that more than one magazine posited the theory that it was the 911 you could actually afford - it is German after all, and VW actually owns Porsche these days so there's a certain sense in it.The new, Mk VII GTI is an even more incredible car, but VW has gone a step further with the Golf R - the fastest Golf in history, and with all-wheel drive and a $51,990 price tag it's one of the greatest performance bargains on the road today.It might not please the people at Porsche to suggest this, but a well-driven Golf R on a twisty bit of road would give a Porsche Cayman owner a horrible, wallet-hurting fright, and a few 911 owners for that matter.It combines prodigious grip with serious rip from its 206kW/380Nm 2.0-litre turbocharged engine. A $112,090 Porsche Cayman has only 202kW and 290Nm and will hit 100km/h in 5.6 seconds, while the Golf R gets there in five flat, which is a huge difference. Even a $228,150 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 only does it in 4.9.This is all the German car any enthusiast needs. Boxer-ing cleverThere are only two car companies in the world willing to tackle the complexities of a boxer engine (in which the cylinders lie flat and punch side to side, instead of up and down) - Porsche and Subaru.Engineers from the riotously rich German company admit they're deeply impressed that the relatively small Japanese concern can manage the engineering task, but the rewards are clearly worthwhile and nowhere more evident than in the legendary Subaru WRX.This incredible car has held the bang-for-your-buck world title belt since its launch in 1995, thanks to its all-wheel-drive setup, sharp chassis and 2.0-litre turbocharged boxer engine which now makes 195kW and 343Nm and will hit 100km/h in 5.4 seconds.Sure, over some of those years it looked like it had been badly beaten up by a designer with a death wish, sporting the equivalent of two black eyes for a while, but the latest version is possibly the best-looking ever.Better yet, the new WRX is just $38,990, making it a full $1000 cheaper than when the original Rex appeared in 1994.Yes, there are quicker cars on the road, but not many, and very few that are more involving. Cheap and ridiculously cheerfulIt's probably physically impossible to drive a Toyota 86/Subaru BRZ without a smile on your face, and not just because you can't believe the price tag.What you need to know straight up is that the Toyobaru - a joint project between Subaru's engineering brilliance (they brought the 2.0-litre boxer engine, but no turbocharger, sadly) and Toyota's global dominance - is not fast. Its 147kW naturally aspirated engine will get you to 100km/h in 7.6 seconds, so you won't see which way a Golf R went. But then it does only cost $29,990.What you get for that price is far more than numbers on a page can express. Its steering has been favourably compared to Porsche's, its rear-wheel-drive and light weight make it a hoot to throw around and there's a kind of purity and simplicity to it that revisits the kind of fun that cars used to be.It's a cheap way to show off the same smile that the guy in the 911 is wearing.

What is a kit car?A kit car is a type of vehicle either built at home or in a small workshop using components sourced from other vehicles, and are often designed to look like a fancier, more expensive vehicle.At one point in Australia’s motoring history the kit car industry was a booming business. Beginning in post-war years, handy people who weren’t prepared to get grimy scrounging wrecking yards to build a hot rod could order a set of plans, or parts in kit form, to build a vehicle at home.The Lotus 7 was thought to be among the first cars sold in kit form, as a way of cheapening the cost of buying the vehicle and avoiding delays in having Lotus assemble a running, driving car. The popularity of the 7 led to a whole class of clubman vehicles that are all about home-built super-lightweight fun.Kit cars in Australia back in the day would see punters order the bare bones parts of the vehicle, sometimes including the chassis and body, which would be supplied unfinished. These DIY handymen would then find the drivetrain from popular makes and models.For those not so talented on the tools, a kit car can be more of a custom vehicle based off a cheap, commonly available donor like the Toyota Celica or Volkswagen Beetle, with a modified body fitted on top. These were often offered as a drive-in, drive-out customisation for client’s existing vehicles by companies like Adelaide’s Creative Cars.Creative Cars sold kits to turn a Beetle into a Porsche 911 lookalike called the Poraga and Porerra, or a Celica dressed as a Ferrari 308 called the Cerino, among others. The latter was initially known as the Ferrino, until Ferrari objected to the name. These weren’t cheap, with the Poraga conversion costing $10,000 back in the mid-1980s!However, the kit car industry was impacted as road rules were created to control the types of cars allowed on Australian roads. While it was OK in the 1950s for anyone to put whatever engine into another type of chassis and fit their own, home-made body on top, by the early 1980s we had federal laws setting a minimum standard for cars being brought into Australia to be sold as road cars (Australian Design Rules), and then we had ever-tightening state-based laws controlling what modifications were permitted for road-going vehicles.By the late 1980s kit cars were mostly sold as replicas of rare 1960s exotic cars like the Ford GT40, Shelby Cobra and Ferrari 250 GTO. Sometimes these cars could be ordered as a turn-key car, or a DIY kit to be built at home to the owner’s exact specifications. However as road regulations tightened through the 1990s, the cost of gaining registration approval for road use skyrocketed to over $300,000 per-car (depending on the state the vehicle needed to be registered in).These costs came as the vehicle had to be built to the same standards as a modern car, which is incredibly difficult in a vehicle built at home to replicate a 1960s car, and then approved by a registered engineering signatory who had a process of inspecting and testing the vehicle. As laws are fluid and constantly changing, many kit cars end up unfinished as owners find it difficult to navigate a highly complex and expensive process. This is why kit cars are all but extinct now in Australia.The good news is there are many ways to build a kit car today, if you have plenty of dollars in the bank and can set aside several years to step through the whole process. For this reason, many people choose to customise their car in a more traditional hot rod-style, rather than building a complete vehicle from the ground-up.Today you can buy car body kits online for a variety of budgets. Among the most popular are the Japanese “Rocket Bunny Pandem” kits from TRA Kyoto’s Kei Miura. Featuring fat, 80s-style rivet-on boxed wide-body guards, deep front bumper extensions, and his trademark duck-tail spoiler, they end a massively aggressive race flair to otherwise common sports cars.Talk to any late-model tuner car enthusiast and they’ll tell you the hottest cars in their scene are Toyota 86 Rocket Bunny, S14 Rocket Bunny Silvia, S15 Rocket Bunny Silvia, an RX-7 Rocket Bunny, or a 350Z Rocket Bunny. They rarely look anything like the original car and could almost be considered a kit car, especially with the popularity of power-adders like the many Toyota 86 turbo kits on offer.For those who are feeling really adventurous there is the Vaydor, which is a drastic restyling of a core Nissan/Infiniti G35 Skyline. There is no firm confirmation if the Vaydor G35 is a road legal kit cars in Australia, so don’t spend your pennies there without doing a lot of research first.The booming market is in electric car kit swaps, where a petrol or diesel drivetrain is replaced with an electric one. Again, legalities concerning these modifications aren’t super-well-understood yet but this is a potential area to keep an eye on if you want a silent-running car but can’t afford a Tesla, or don’t want to give up your favourite ride. 

Right off the top of your head, tell us, who is the most beautiful woman on the planet right now? We’ll give you five seconds.

When it comes to suspension, both the front and rear systems are equally important, unless you enjoy the prospect of your car dragging its rump like a carpet-ruining dog or burying its nose like a tru

There’s a sprinkling of genuinely exciting metal that will be hitting our shores over the next 12 months.

The key to successful investment is to find a car that is sufficiently unusual, rare or notable that it will, in time, return you a profit should you sell it.