Ferrari Vs.s Porsche

Let's not underestimate the value of the exclusivity also. I've had my car for 3 weeks - bought it instead of a new P Turbo. My wife made 2 comments recently that are particularly telling: "wow, people really do take notice of this car" and "you know, it seems to me like I see Porsches everywhere these days." Hard to quantify the value, but it matters.

 

I certainly wouldn't kick a F430 out of bed for eating crackers.

Jim, I can't seem to scare my wife. She may get a little car sick after a while, but she doesn't even grab the "oh ****" handles when I carve hard into turns, or start pretending I am a race car driver. She says she has ridden in plenty of crazy machines, so the fear factor is gone. She is a total hottie who partied a lot in her teens and early 20's, so she has been there / done that. Like I said, seems to me your wife should BE your mistress. Mine certainly is. Oh, this thread was about cars, wasn't it? lol

 

That could greatly depend on ones location. Aroud here, I see several 360's/430's daily. 911T's are actually rare.

 

Adrift,

Does your wife have a sister who is available?

Jim

 

true...but in outright numbers, and in most locations, 911's are anything but rare compared to F cars...

 

Hello All,

Here is my few cents on this subject...

There are several factors to keep in mind when you decide to compare these two cars. The F430 and the 997 Turbo.

1. First is that Ferrari is still a factory that builds cars mostly by hand, were Porsche has changed from a factory that builds cars by hand to more automation. Some may remember Porsche Excs hired a group of semi-retired Japanese Excs to help transform the way Porsche builds cars. Porsche also is looking to maximize profits. This is obtained by building three models that share lots of parts. The Boxster and the caymen are basically the same car and the 911 shares parts with both of these cars.

2. Also remember that Porsche builds many more cars than Ferrari. Even if Ferrari builds 5000 cars this year that is nothing compared to Porsche. Porsche built 102,602 cars total. Porsche built 34,386 911 last year.

3. It has to be quite a few years back now that Porsche looked at the parts pricing issue. Porsche saw many companies making parts for Porsches that were under cutting Porsche’s prices. Porsche decided to reduce its parts prices to be more competitive with the others. This obviously makes maintenance on a Porsche cheaper. Compare this to Ferrari. Ferrari decided to control who makes the parts and for parts to be sold through Ferrari, be it FNA or Spa. It is difficult to buy parts for a Ferrari from the OEM.

4. The other major issue is owners of Porsches drive their cars more. You may drive your 997 to work, run down to the corner store, or pick the kids up at school etc. Driving a Porsche even a Turbo has become easy and depending where you live you can see many Porsches every day driving around. Ferrari owners on the other hand drive their cars much less. Some drive their cars less than a 1000 miles per year. And if you live in a part of the country where is it cold and or possibly snows then your Ferrari sits for months without moving. This adds to the cost of ownership. Any modern sports car has not been designed to sit for long periods of time. Cars were meant to be driven not sit. And even more so for modern sports cars. Everything is controlled by computers.

It is true history has something to do with it. But one cannot say it is racing heritage. Porsche has a very good racing heritage as well as Ferrari. Porsche admittedly has always raced in more endurance races than anything else. Ferrari decided to race in Formula 1 and give up most of it’s endurance racing.

There is still a mystique about and around a Ferrari. There used to be a mystique about a Porsche. For some that has changed. Porsche has become more commonplace almost like driving a Benz or BMW. Some of us may have even decided to buy the 997 Turbo vs. a M6 or CL55. Cars we consider more transportation be it nice transportation. As Porsche has made the 997 any everyday kind of car that is what happens to the special ness about driving a Porsche. The 997 are too easy to drive. It takes less skill. Anyone remember the stories of old 911s. It was a car you need to respect or it would bite you hard. Porsche in its brilliance has engineered the scary part out of the 911. It is far more user friendly now. And before several of you get offended I am not saying a 911 is simple to drive. It does still take skill to be fast and good on a track. But it has become easier to drive day in and day out.

One can say similar things about Ferraris. The F430 is easier to drive than say much older Ferraris. One might even say you can drive your F430 everyday. But owners for the most part don't. May be it is the production numbers, may be it is the hand craftmanship, or the design and style, or yes may be the cost of maintenance, or may be when you do drive your Ferrari it is a special event, feeling and the sound it makes. It all plays to your senses and if you love sports cars it is like nothing else on earth. One we want to savior. It makes you smile. There is a person I know that has a saying "some cars the people on the outside are enjoying it more than the person driving it and then there are cars where the person driving is enjoying it more than the people seeing it drive by". There is nothing more true about driving a Ferrari. When people see a Ferrari driving by they point and may say "wow", but that is nothing to the feeling of driving one. It always makes me smile.

IMHO and words

Thanks,

 

lol - No, but she is like a sex counselor for lots of her female friends. She is always encouraging them to be more active and receptive with their husbands. She asks them "no matter how tired or whatever you are, isn't it worth 15 minutes of your day to make your husband a happier, more content, less predatory man?" So many of them have little to no sex life, it is very sad. I am a lucky man.

 

This isn't meant as an attack against Ferrari's specifically, but "hand crafted" is not always a good thing, especially in a manufacturing environment. Robots and machines may be "soul-less", but they are VERY good at doing the same thing, over and over again, without getting bored, without losing focus, without tolerances changing from one item to the next. They provide consistency which hand-building cannot approach. This affects how the entire thing fits together, and of course how well it works. Now whether the consistency is good or bad depends on how much money and tech is invested in getting GOOD machines to do the work.

I can see someone responding that it is this very human interaction with the assembly process that gives meaning and soul to the car. Those are intangibles only each individual can assess.

 

Buy the Ferrari of your dreams, but only after it's 10 years old. It may be the cheapest car you'll ever own.

 

Money is a concern for me, but I drive a Ferrari.

The best ones aren't the newest ones anyway. Would you rather have a Porsche 997 Turbo or a Ferrari 512TR in the driveway?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

With regard to your initial post, Porsche and Ferrari are both playing with the same laws of physics, tire technology, traction control electronics, and such. The driving experience is incredibly different, though, and for most of us here it's worth the additional maintenance expense that accompanies low volume, somewhat hand-assembled cars.

 

Congrats on your prolific sex life.

 

Anybody on this board ever hear the saying "Variety is the spice of life"?

I'm referring to cars, although I've heard rumors that the same can be said of women. So get the car you want, drive it for a while. If you get bored, trade into something else. If it keeps floating your boat, then stick with it...

 

Sorry, didn't mean to make it sound that way.

 

If you want a Porsche, go buy a Porsche. It's no substitute for a Ferrari.

 

Hahahaha...

 

As a Ferrari is no substitute for a Porsche. They have significantly different strengths and weaknesses.

 

I would rather have a 997GT3RS in my driveway than a 512TR.

 

+1

What he said! MUCH rather have.

 

I have owned both. I currently have a Ferrari and always will. I will NEVER own another Porsche. Enough said.

 

My rhetorical question was about a 997 Turbo, but regardless...

For the track, I'd certainly take the 2008 (?) Porsche over a 13-year old Ferrari. But my heart tells me to go with a Ferrari V12 over a Porsche flat six -- especially the modern water-cooled appliances. I don't see much difference among modern Porsches other than bhp ratings.

It's hard, maybe impossible, to go back. My brother's looking for another 911 now, and I just can't that worked about them anymore.

 

Porsches feel mass-produced. Ferraris don't. Porsches also feel very German. Ferraris don't.

I'm doing two legal diligence matters right now, and the difference in client attitudes is so striking. The German client wants to be involved in organizing every little minutiae. Every day, there are phone calls to go over progress, detail where we are going from here, etc. Every little thing is planned and then planned again. That's Porsche in a nutshell.

It's hard to fault hard work and "perfection," but I guess that's why people like handmade suits over machine-made; why people like hand-painted art versus a design made by a computer based on a matematical formula; why people like Ferrari instead of Porsche.

 

Back in high school, my wood shop teacher got onto a rant over power planer machines. He was going off on the fact that a machine-planed wood surface had the markings of the rotary blades, but a hand planed surface did not. I took up this logic with my grandfather (who was a real crafstman in his own right) - thinking that he would be quite impressed by this "hand craft" superiority.

To my surprise, he called this notion BS. He made the important point that it was by any standard impossible to attain dimensional accuracy with a hand plane no matter how good you were, and that a normal finish sanding would immediately eliminate the tool marks. This made me think long and hard over the common perception that "hand made" things were always better...maybe a Strad violin, but we haven't been able to "hand make" something like that in centuries.

My point here is that probably the term "hand made" is not very relavent to either a Ferrari or a Porsche - they are both stamped, molded, machined, etc. like any other car. The main difference, as already noted, is production quantity. Porsche can afford to go to greater engineering depth with it's cars because the engineering costs get averaged over more units.

The Ferrari is for people who want something more rare and "special" than can be had even in a low production volume car like a Porsche, and who understand that this comes at considerable cost both in usability and market price.

 

It used to be extremely relevant. Porsche 356s were hand made - I think I have a photo somewhere of the factory with rows of 356 shells on individual stands (not an assembly line in the Henry Ford sense). Ferraris were handmade even longer, certainly through the Dino/Daytona era. Even the 308/328/TR were 'hand-finished', meaning the body panels were machine stamped and then affixed to the frame by hand, until the unibody 348 and later cars.

Also, if you watch the televised special, 'Ultimate Factories', you'll see that the engine for even the newest Ferrari -- the 599 -- is made from its own sand castings. And the interiors looked to be hand fitted and stitched. So even well into the robot age I think even 430/599/612 owners can say that his car was less mass-produced than a Porsche. As you say, that has its good and bad aspects.

But I definitely agree with your point, that many of us like that our cars are rare. (There may have been 7000 Testarossas made, so it's a 'common' Ferrari, but in the grand scheme of things they're damn rare.) I admit when I go to exotic car events and there are two other 328s that I almost wish they weren't there... and take solace that mine's an off color.

 

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz............................