NO BULLS***!

THE NEW 911 DAKAR OFF-ROADER PROVES IT'S ANYTHING BUT A CYNICAL MARKETING EXERCISE

- SCOTT EVANS

Technology is amazing. I’m standing in the middle of the Moroccan Sahara Desert on the phone with my boss in Los Angeles. He wants to make sure I put the screws to the engineers I’m about to see: Make sure the new Porsche 911 Dakar “isn’t a bunch of marketing bullshit,” in his words. Good news: It’s not.

I don’t have to ask the engineers (I do anyway) because I just spent the day tearing down desert two-tracks and surfing dunes … in a factory Porsche 911. It’s so preposterous, all we could do was laugh like kids the entire way. It’s an actual dream come true, something you’ve always thought could be fun but never dared try. What if an off-roader drove like a 911? Wouldn’t that be cool as hell? Turns out, it is. Who would’ve guessed?

As rally cars have long demonstrated, a car with good on-limit behavior on a paved road will drive just as well off-road, where you’re often at or over the limit. The 911 Dakar is the ultimate proof of this theorem. Yes, 911s drive great on the road. All of them. There’s not one variant among the more than two dozen Porsche builds that doesn’t set the bar for sports cars. All that greatness translates beautifully to the dirt.