The Correct Way to Pronounce Porsche

August 13, 2008

porsh-uh-not-porsh My blog puts me in touch with Porsche owners the world over. Lately, what used to be as rare as an original 550 Spyder seems to be as prolific as a Honda Accord (and this from amongst the anointed few.) What blasphemy is this that I speak of? None other than the incorrect pronunciation of our beloved brand. If you’re new to the marque then the confusion is understandable. However, if you are a long time Porsche owner then there really is no excuse. No, it’s not the end of the world it you don’t pronounce it correctly, you just risk sounding like a sheisskopf to those in the know…

Let’s review. The Porsche brand is of German origin and a family/surname. These two facts combine to provide an easy and definitive pronunciation.

Fact 1: In the German language, the “e” at the end of Porsche is pronounced. IT IS NOT SILENT. Very similar to the the word Deutsche. It’s not DOYTSCH. It’s DOYTSCH-UH.

Fact 2: Forget about Fact 1. This is a family name. If you listen to discussions with, or about, any of the founding family members, they all pronounce the name in one way and one way only.

This means that Porsche is never pronounced PORSH and should always be pronounced PORSH-UH.

The only correct pronunciation of Porsche is Porsh-Uh

Someone actually wanted to debate this with me the other night by suggesting there is no correct pronunciation. Their argument was that PORSH was just the “American” translation of the German word. I’m sure you can imaging my response, “Nein, nein, nein!! Das ist nicht richtig!” (not correct) The fact is Porsche (PORSH-UH) is a family name. You don’t decide how you want to pronounce it. You pronounce it as it was meant to be. Verstehen Sie (understand)?

By the way, Porsche (you should now be pronouncing it correctly) is not the only German brand or name to suffer this fate. Take a look at the table below for other familiar examples. At the bottom is a link for the correct pronunciation of each name including PORSH-UH!

Frequently Mispronounced Terms
GERMAN in ENGLISH with correct phonetic pronunciation
Word/Name	Pronunciation
Adidas™	AH-dee-dass
Bayer™	bye-er
Braun™ Eva Braun	brown (not ‘brawn’)
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)	soyce
Goethe German author, poet	GER-ta (’er’ as in fern) and all oe-words
Hofbräuhaus in Munich	HOFE-broy-house
Loess/Löss (geology) fine-grained loam soil	lerss (’er’ as in fern)
Neanderthal Neandertal	nay-ander-tall
Porsche™	PORSH-uh
Gerhard Schröder German chancellor	shrer-der (’er’ as in fern) not shro-der!
Phonetic guides shown are only approximate. Terms marked with the ™ symbol are trademarked brands. Hear MP3 Audio for these words!

[Table and Audio Source: About.com]

Written by 993C4S · Filed Under Advice | 3 Comments

How Much Money Have you Wasted Buying Premium Fuel for Your Porsche?

August 8, 2008

Even with the price of oil dropping quickly, the prices at the pump reflect this change much more slowly. Premium gasoline (91 to 93 octane) in my part of the world is still well north of $4.00 per gallon. Imagine my surprise then after reading a NY Times article that it just might be that I’ve been wasting my money for a very long time. Sure, there are some performance trade-offs, but if the article is to be believed, they are very minor. Let’s explore this topic some more.

My most modern Porsche is a 1997 993 C4S. According to the manual I should only use a “premium” grade unleaded fuel with an Octane rating of 91 or higher. Because I love my car and I don’t want to hurt it, and, I had no reason to believe I could do anything but what the manual said, I have always run premium fuel in my car. In most instances 93 octane. When I can’t find 93 I put in at least 91. What is an Octane rating? Good question.

Octane Ratings Defined

According to How Stuff Works:

The octane rating of gasoline tells you how much the fuel can be compressed before it spontaneously ignites. Lower-octane gas (like “regular” 87-octane gasoline) can handle the least amount of compression before igniting.

The name “octane” comes from the following fact: When you take crude oil and “crack” it in a refinery, you end up getting hydrocarbon chains of different lengths. These different chain lengths can then be separated from each other and blended to form different fuels. For example, you may have heard of methane, propane and butane. All three of them are hydrocarbons. Methane has just a single carbon atom. Propane has three carbon atoms chained together. Butane has four carbon atoms chained together. Pentane has five, hexane has six, heptane has seven and octane has eight carbons chained together.

It turns out that heptane handles compression very poorly. Compress it just a little and it ignites spontaneously. Octane handles compression very well — you can compress it a lot and nothing happens. Eighty-seven-octane gasoline is gasoline that contains 87-percent octane and 13-percent heptane (or some other combination of fuels that has the same performance of the 87/13 combination of octane/heptane). It spontaneously ignites at a given compression level, and can only be used in engines that do not exceed that compression ratio.

For some, that’s probably more than you ever wanted to know about Octane; for others, it’s probably not enough. Stay with me as I’m not trying to turn this into a technical post. To sum things up, we use a higher Octane rated fuel in our Porsches to avoid spontaneous combustion that could cause knocking, thus potentially damaging our motors. This begs the question…

What is Engine Knocking and How can it Damage a Motor?

Almost all cars use four-stroke gasoline engines. One of the “strokes” is the compression stroke, where the engine compresses a cylinder-full of air and gas into a much smaller volume before igniting it with a spark plug. When gas ignites by compression rather than because of the spark from the spark plug, it causes knocking in the engine. Knocking can damage an engine, by creating excessive and premature wear to the piston and cylinder walls, so it is not something you want to have happening.

Today’s newer cars, including Porsches, have sophisticated computerized engine monitoring. These electronic brains monitor the activity in our motors and can actually advance or retard the timing (when the spark fires to ignite the fuel and push down the piston) in order to curtail any potential knocking before it happens.

What about warranty issues you ask? Won’t running lower than the recommended fuel octane ratings void your warranty. Tony Fouladpour, as spokesman for Porsche North America, was quoted in the NY Times article as saying,

“If you want the car to perform at its maximum capability, the best choice would not be 87, but we do not forbid it.”

I’m not suggesting you run out and start putting 87 octane in your Porsche, in fact just the opposite. I realize the title to this article may be a little misleading, but it is not intentional. In fact, it’s the question I wanted to answer, it just took me a long time to get there. So, how much money have you wasted buying premium fuel for your Porsche? My answer is none.

Let’s face it, sure you might save a couple of bucks a fill-up, but do you really want to take the risk? Curiously enough, Porsche doesn’t set a cut-off date for the statement made by Mr. Fouladpour. Clearly you don’t want to run anything than what is recommended in anything older than a 996 model. I just wouldn’t trust the engine control systems to do a good enough job. To me, saving a few bucks at each fill up just isn’t worth the potential of a five figure engine rebuild.

There are quite a few threads on both Rennlist and Pelican on this subject. I’d be curious to know what each of you think? What are you running for gas in your car? What about Ethanol and its effect on your motor and performance? I’ll have more on this subject next week.

[Source: How Stuff Works and NY Time online edition]

Written by 993C4S · Filed Under Porsche Mainenance Tips | 2 Comments

A Simple Tip to Increase the Gas Mileage in Your Porsche

July 30, 2008

Today’s post comes from guest blogger Andrew Granieri. You may remember Andrew from his great set of posts that outlined the detailing and transformation of the paint on his Porsche 944. As a refresher, Andrew is a student at Miami University, studying Technical & Scientific Communications with a double Minor in Marketing & Entrepreneurship. He enjoys maintaining his 1986 Porsche 944 and joy-riding in his father’s 997 whenever possible. Here’s what Andrew had to say…

Drivers rejoice! The price of oil recently dropped significantly, but we all know fuel prices are wildly inconsistent day to day, week to week. A poll was posed a couple months ago on this blog, asking drivers if they changed their driving habits in these strange times, when $3.89 is considered a great deal for a gallon of gasoline. I didn’t think of changing my habits much when the poll was created, but now that I commute from Cincinnati to Cleveland on the weekends, I’ve reconsidered. Over the past two months, I’ve experimented with my driving style and found that small changes can in fact, make a profound impact on my mileage as well as my wallet.

I feel I should note that I have always supported the idea of driving a car as it was designed to be driven. While (sigh) slow by today’s standards, my normally-aspirated 944 wasn’t designed with puttering around in mind. In the past 3 years that I’ve owned it, 80% of the time I’ve been behind the wheel was time spent really driving it; shifting at or past 5,000 RPMS (once up to temp, of course!), spirited down-shifts, etc. Perhaps this accounts for my catastrophic ring and pinion failure earlier this year? – nah…

Gas mileage is great for a Porsche

That said, one would think my mileage on the road is about as poor as it is on the track. Not so! I did some rough calculations from last season and found my track mileage to be in the neighborhood of 7-12 mpg, which is pretty bad! However, on the street, as enthusiastic as I am behind the wheel I’ve found I consistently get between 22-27mpg, depending on my city-highway driving ratio. While that mileage doesn’t put a Prius to shame, it’s certainly respectable for a Porsche. But I knew from the way I drove that it was capable of more, and my job in Cleveland gave me the perfect opportunity to try out a few things.

My Oxford apartment is about 260 miles away from downtown Cleveland, which makes for a lot of freeway driving. However, my daily commute to work is from a suburb 40 minutes outside of town, often in stop and go rush hour traffic, so I’m still getting a fair amount of “city” driving in as well. 944’s came with a surprisingly large 21.1 gallon fuel tank, and I fall into the elite (read: poorer than they look) group of people who can say they drive a Porsche and fill up with 87 octane at the pump. I’ve now gone through several tanks of fuel, with dramatic results, with only one major change to my driving style: throttle control.

As hard as it is to resist the urge to drive a bit faster, I’ve managed a few thousand miles this summer not shifting higher than 3,000 RPMs and surprisingly, the difference in fuel economy has been astounding. Now for some quick and dirty math: if I average my range, mentioned above, of avg. mpg — 22 and 27, I get 24.5 mpg with my typical driving style. Assuming I drive until the car’s almost empty and consume 20 gallons of fuel, the MPG comes out to 490 miles covered — very respectable, even if it’s in part to the large fuel tank. Twice now since I started driving less aggressively, I’ve put 20.2 and 20.1 gallons in with the odometer at 565 and 540 miles respectively — that’s roughly 28 and 27 mpg!

32 Miles per gallon in a 944

Not bad, you say, but my record — and this is ASTOUNDING — a touch under 640 miles and I filled the tank with 20 gallons and some change — that’s close to THIRTY-TWO miles per gallon! I’m convinced I’ll never be that lucky with fuel economy, as there were a few extenuating circumstances that week; I’d left Cincinnati for my job in Cleveland job at 2 am, which left me with ZERO traffic to slow down for so my speed and fuel consumption was slow and consistent for the 250 mile drive up and during the week I also was very fortunate to avoid the brunt of rush hour traffic. I have all my receipts to prove fuel purchases, but didn’t document the miles and forgot to snap a photo of my dashboard before resetting my odometer — should I repeat the same feat with as much success as 32 mpg I’ll be sure to take a photo, even if it’s from my camera phone. I will admit with fuel prices starting to come down, it may be hard for me to continue this thrifty driving style; time will tell.

Give us some feedback

But proving to the world that a 22-year old four-banger can be fuel-efficient wasn’t my intent with this writing. I want to ask fellow Porsche owners — what’s the highest MPG you’ve achieved in your car? I’m also issuing a challenge — spend a few weeks not riding to the red line, I know these cars were made to be driven, but if you are fortunate enough to say a Porsche is your daily driver, it is worth the patience to investigate your fuel economy — you might surprise yourself! Post your MPGs in a comment below and don’t forget to let us know what you’re driving!

This may be followed up with me attempting something similar with my old man’s 997 C4S, which I believe averages 19.2 mpg according to the on-board computer – but for me to conduct such a test would require him to willingly relinquish his keys.

Written by 993C4S · Filed Under Porsche Mainenance Tips | Leave a Comment