The ‘Superior All-Rounder’ and Other Lies They Tell Ya

Another day, another press release from some fancy German car company, this time Porsche, blathering on about their ‘superior all-rounder’ 911 Turbo S. Superior all-rounder, eh? Sounds like something a marketing intern cooked up to justify the price tag to folks who’ll never actually push the thing past 60 on their way to the golf course. Back in my day, a car was a car. You wanted speed, you got a dragster. You wanted comfort, you got a Cadillac. Now, they want one vehicle to do everything, and what you end up with is something that does a lot of things mediocrely, but costs a fortune. It’s like trying to run CAD on a Nintendo Game Boy. Sure, you could in theory, but why would you want to?

The Illusion of Progress and These Damn Touchscreens

They talk about ‘combining performance, long-distance comfort, exclusivity, and everyday usability.’ What they mean is, they’ve crammed so much bloatware and so many ‘features’ into it that half the time you’ll be trying to figure out how to turn off the lane assist while your latte spills. I bet it’s got more screens than a Best Buy, all touch-sensitive, of course. Can’t have a good old physical button anymore, can we? Imagine trying to adjust the climate control when you’re going 180 mph on a track, staring at a smooth pane of glass trying to hit the right pixel. You’ll end up in a ditch before you find the fan speed setting. Give me a rotary dial any day of the week. At least I can find that with my eyes closed, which is more than I can say for these newfangled ‘intuitive’ interfaces.

And don’t even get me started on the ‘everyday usability’ part. What exactly is ‘everyday usable’ about a car that probably scrapes its undercarriage on a pebble? Is it ‘everyday usable’ for going to the grocery store to pick up artisanal kale and a $12 coffee? I suppose it is if your everyday involves a track day and a personal pit crew to change your tires for urban driving. This isn’t a tool, it’s a statement. A statement that says, ‘I have too much money and not enough common sense.‘

The Benchmarking Nonsense

They claim the predecessor was ‘already considered the benchmark.’ Benchmark for what? For separating fools from their money? For making normal sedans feel utterly inadequate on the freeway? These ‘benchmarks’ are all in their little industry bubble. For the average person, a car is about getting from point A to point B without a heart attack from the monthly payment or trying to debug the infotainment system with a screwdriver. All this talk of ‘superior all-rounders’ and ‘benchmarks’ is just smoke and mirrors to distract from the fact that they’re selling you a glorified, overpriced toy. A very fast, very complicated toy that’ll probably require a software update every Tuesday, just like my phone. My flip phone, that is, the one that still makes calls and doesn’t try to track my every movement.

In conclusion, this Porsche 911 Turbo S, with all its alleged advancements and ‘all-rounder’ status, just sounds like another step down the path of over-engineered obsolescence. Give me a solid, reliable machine any day, one I can fix with a wrench and not a laptop. These kids and their fancy phones and their fancy cars, they’ll never know the simple satisfaction of a well-engineered piece of hardware that just works without needing a patch to fix some ‘zero-day vulnerability’ in its cupholder. What a world. What a truly, utterly bewildering world.