Latest / Performance Car Ownership with Gary / I Drove a 2026 911 Cabriolet Through the Alps — Should I Trade My 718 Spyder?

Transcript

I Drove a 2026 911 Cabriolet Through the Alps — Should I Trade My 718 Spyder? · Performance Car Ownership with Gary

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now many car enthusiasts automatically assume that any new 911 is an upgrade compared to any 718 Series Porsche.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: I just proved that's not always the case.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Why are there cows blocking our road?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: I've been home for a week now and people keep asking me the same question.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Would I trade my 718 Spider for that red 911 Cabriolet?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: I told you I wouldn't sugarcoat this, so here's the honest answer.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it's more complicated than a yes or a no.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I just spent seven days driving this 2026 Porsche 911 Cabriolet through Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: The Autobahn.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Eight mountain passes.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now if you're new here, I post honest numbers-driven performance car reviews.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: No PR cars, no paid reviews.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also a PCA national track instructor.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now here's how we're breaking this down.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Why these two cars aren't really the same kind of car at all.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: The numbers head to head.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: The real money, what it actually felt like to live with this car for a week, the good and the genuinely annoying, the mountain pass that changed everything, that wasn't even supposed to be on the itinerary, and finally, my honest answer.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now don't skip ahead.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: The answer only makes sense once you've seen everything that leads up to it.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, before a single number, these two cars aren't competing for the same job.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: My 718 Spider is a mid-engine track-capable roaster, the car I take to Canadian Tire Motorsport Park.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: The 911 Cabriolet is a front trunk, rear engine grand tour, built to be comfortable first and sporty second.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: A week living with the Cabriolet didn't change that fundamental fact.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: What it did change was my understanding of exactly who this kind of car is actually for.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, let's do a head-to-head comparison of the numbers first.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: So my spider has 414 horsepower versus 388 for that 911 Cabrio.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that results in a 060 time of 3.4 seconds for my spider versus 4.1.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: And when we compare the weight of 3,273 pounds for the 718 spider, compared to 3,523 pounds for that 911 Cabriolet.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, that cabriolet is about 250 pounds heavier and almost two inches wider than my spider.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now that width number matters more than it looks on paper.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Hold that thought.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: It comes back a little bit later on some very narrow alpine roads.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: MSRP, my spider was 103,000 US dollars new and it's pretty much worth that now.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: This 911 Cabriolet starts at$151,750 base trim, but no options.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's a$49,000 gap for a car that's lower on paper.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now I didn't purchase this 911 Cabriolet.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: I rented it at$8,320 and$50 US dollars for seven days, or about$1,186 a day at all in.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now what I didn't expect was the fuel costs.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: We were only covering about$150 miles a day, and we still stopped to fill up daily, which total$501.83 US dollars for the week in gas alone.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Between Autobahn speeds, spirited pass driving, and European fuel prices sitting well above North American ones at$10.89 US dollars per US gallon.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: This was genuinely the most expensive week of driving I've ever done.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's before we even talk about what it would actually cost to own one of these 9-11 Cabriolets.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: So this trip started in Munich picking up the 9-11 Cabriolet at uh Amaron Motor World.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: First real test, the Autobahn.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm not gonna spend long on this here.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a full dedicated video breaking down exactly what no speed limit actually means and where those stretches really are on the Autobahn coming very soon.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss it.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Short version, I hit 261 kilometers an hour, which is about 162 miles an hour, and the car was planted, predictable, and surprisingly quiet the whole time.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm sure the insulated top on that uh Carrera cab helped considerably compared to the uninsulated spider's top.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Just like my 718 Spider.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: There were no warnings about the roof being in the closed position above 120 miles an hour, unlike the Spider RS.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Both the 718 Spider and the 911 Cabrio that I rented, their top speeds are totally uh totally available with the top up.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking about the top, I think the cab looks great with the top up, but I think it looks very odd with the top down, almost literally like the top was chopped off.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: While my 718 spider looks amazing with that very finicky top up or down.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, let's talk about what living with this uh 9-11 cab relay actually felt like.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: The transformation I genuinely loved.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Every single day, the same small ritual.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Put the start up the car, put her into sport mode, sport exhaust, PDK into manual, and every single day this comfortable grand tour turned into something I actually wanted to put her to a memoir.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: The exhaust note, if I'm honest, had a better purple than my uh supply.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, there was that small annoyance.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: You had to reselect sport mode, the speed warning override, and shut off start-stop every single time you started the car.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Mildly maddening, though I'll give it this.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: My spider does the exact same thing.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Although it's much simpler to turn off that start-stop in my spider.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Portia, if you're watching this, please make it more simpler.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when it comes to the width, remember that almost two-inch width difference from the numbers uh chapter.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, on narrow driving roads we were actually driving.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: That was a real daily concern.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Passing oncoming traffic, threading through towns with curves just a few inches high that will curb your wheel if you misjudge it by an inch.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't damage a wheel, but I thought about it constantly in a way I never do in my spider.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: CarPlay failed us, and it actually mattered.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Both wireless and wired uh car play dropped out multiple times over the week.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: On a normal drive, that's an inconvenience.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: On a rally-style tour, where the only way you knew where to go was from that Google map on screen, was the route.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Losing CarPlay meant losing navigation entirely, and it happened at some genuinely inopportune moments.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Although the intent of the tour was for each of us to be driving independently of the others, when that navigation failed, our only alternative was to follow someone else and just hope that their navigation hadn't failed too.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: My wife travels with a collapsible wheelchair.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: It wouldn't have fit in my spider's trunk no way at all.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: In the 9-11 Cabriel, loading and unloading it was dramatically easier, you know, than I expected.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Partially due to the backseat space, but mostly the roof.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is a one-touch power top, operable at up to 30 miles per hour, and you can even start lowering it from outside the car while you're walking up to the car.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: That meant less fumbling, less time standing at the curb, and one less thing to manage on a trip that already had way too many moving parts as it was.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Totally unlike my fully manual convertible top on my spider, which definitely can't be raised while the car is in motion, that's for sure.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's not a spec sheet number.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's the kind of thing you only learn by actually living with a car for a week.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the single biggest real-world advantage the Cabriolet had over my spider full stop.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: A few other honest notes.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: We hit uh rough temporary road surfaces at a few construction zones and never bottomed out or scraped the front squitter.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: More reassuring than I expected in this 9-11 Cabriolet, but I'm sure it would have been a genuine concern in my 718 spider due to ground clearance.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Open top visibility, going up the switchbacks was genuinely better than a coop uh would have given you.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Looking straight up at the mountains through the passes is something that you don't get any other way.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: A small detail, but a real one.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't turn the radio on once all week.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: The car, the roads, and each other were enough.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Another peculiarity was the real spoiler.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it stayed up when we parked the car at lower speeds, and sometimes it retracted just randomly.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: And this trip gave me a new appreciation for why massive supercars and hypercars mostly don't make sense on these narrow European roads.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Even this 9-11 Cabriolet felt very wide on some of those roads.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Any bigger than this would have been genuinely impractical.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Another couple who were driving the same 9-11 as ours had pulled over and stopped to let an oncoming vehicle by on an extremely narrow road, only to watch helplessly as their driver's side mirror rubbed a stripe on the paint down the whole side of that van and damaged the Porsche's mirror in the process.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now the pass I wanted most on this entire trip was the Stelveo.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't get it.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Groups like ours aren't allowed on it anymore, and on top of that, it was closed the one day we could have gone for a bicycle race.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Two separate reasons, both completely outside of our control.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: So the tour operator substituted something else: the Countertal Glacier Road in Austria.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: 29 hair pins up to a dead end at a glacier car park.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Not on the original plan at all.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Near the bottom, our whole group got stopped for several minutes as roughly 200 cows were herded down the road.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now you certainly don't see that every day.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now more about those cows a little bit later.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Then Cheryl and I drove up that road alone.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Sport mode on, sport exhaust open, PDK and manual, shifting every gear myself.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Although this 911 Cabriolet wasn't as powerful and is heavier than my 718 Spider, I found the power more than adequate for driving both the Autobahn and those fabulous Alps Mountain Roads.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: The brakes were certainly more than adequate for, again, both the Autobahn and the mountain roads, but when I reached the top of the Kunertal, you could definitely smell those brakes.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the honest truth: this was the best drive of the entire week.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Better than anything I'd planned.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: If everything had gone according to plan and we made it to Stelveo, I might have been fighting traffic and congestion on one of the most famous, most crowded roads in the Alps.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I would have missed this drive entirely.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: I still wanted the Stelve.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but losing it is what put me on this road instead.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I wouldn't trade that for my experience blasting up the countertop.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: When selecting reverse, I didn't know how many times I ended up in neutral.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, and that button for park?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now who thought that was a great idea?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: I know after a week I still didn't get used to that at all.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: When putting the car in park, there was always a delay before the doors unlocked, which caused me to fumble with the locks before being able to get out of the car.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now I intentionally requested the red cabriolet to see how people reacted to its looks.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: We had a busload of young people walk by it and barely took any notice.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: But one lady in the parking lot told me it was absolutely gorgeous.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: She loved my Ferrari.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: She was a little embarrassed when I corrected her.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: I know those black wheels are extremely popular, but silver wheels would look so much better on a red Porsche.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Those back seats, well, they're a total joke.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: This area would be far better suited and finished as just a storage area.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: One thing I should note here that I did like was not only did the car have a sport mode, but also a wet mode to minimize slipping around when we encountered what those cows left behind on the road and subsequently ended up being sprayed on our car.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, before my verdict, here's what real owners of both cars say long term.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because a week isn't a full ownership picture.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: 718 Spider owners say, you know, they love it.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: The PDK feels uh almost manual in how it holds the power band.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: The back rates off is good enough.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And owners, you know, really don't need to touch it.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's beautiful, it looks, draws a crowd everywhere it goes, especially in a bright color like mine in Miami blue.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: What they hate, while wind buffeting starting as low as 50 miles an hour, the manual top is noisy when up, fussy, and has a known flaw that can eventually lead to damage.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Long highway trips have been called by some folks as a beating.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: And when it comes to the 992.2 911 Cabriolet owners, and about what they love, well, that powered roof.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: 12 seconds on the move up to 31 miles per hour is the single most praised feature.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Wind management with the deflector up is described as coop quiet.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: The chassis gives up almost nothing to that coop.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: In terms of what they hate, well, no manual transmission available on this trim at all.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Some longtime 9-11 owners say the modern car feels sterile compared to older, lighter Porsches.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: The back seats are still basically decorative, but were ideal for loading in my wife's folding travel wheelchair on this trip.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Many hated the full digital display of the dashboard, but you know what?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: I preferred the more cohesive look compared to my spiders, where some of the the uh gauges are digital and some are analog.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Everything I found in real owner forums matched what I felt in those seven days, right down to the roof being the single most practical win.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: So would I trade my 718 Spider for a 2026 911 Cabriolet?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm definitely keeping my spider.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's lighter, more powerful, faster, and it's still the car I prefer to track, a Canadian Tire Motorsport Park.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing about this week changed that.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: My Spider just feels more special.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: I prefer its normally aspirated 8,000 RPM engine to the Cabriolet 7,500 RPM turbo engine with its minimal, but it's still there, turbo leg.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now that 911 Cabriolet's additional cost of$49,000 on top of my car definitely wouldn't make it worth it for me.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I wouldn't trade even if the cost was the same.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm not going to pretend this car isn't a genuinely good option for a lot of people who aren't me.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you've looked at a 718 Spider and hesitated because of the manual roof, the lack of storage space, the rough ride, or the fact that it's built as a track car first and a grand tour second, the 911 Cabriolet answers every one of those specific complaints.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: The roof alone and what it meant for something as simple as loading in my wife's wheelchair made a bigger real difference on our trip than that extra 22 horsepower ever would have made.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this wouldn't be a trade for me, but if any of those specific spider frustrations sound like your frustrations, this is a legitimate, well-reasoned alternative, not just a more expensive badge.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now many car enthusiasts automatically assume that any new 9-11 is an upgrade compared to any 718 series Porsche.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: I just proved that's not always the case, at least for me.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's my honest answer.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Seven days and eight mountain passes later.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you want the full story on more of this trip, the autobawn run, the individual passes, or the pass that wasn't even supposed to happen, click over here for my full playlist.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: When those videos become available, they'll be right there.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And be sure to subscribe for the rest of the series, and I'll see you in the next one.