Do you ever wish you were driving around town in a flashy sports car instead of your sensible sedan? Or maybe you actually went and splashed out for a performance roadster, only to discover that the bumper-to-bumper traffic around here doesn’t exactly allow you to open it up to the speeds you had been dreaming about? Porsche wants you to know that they care about you and these very difficult situations you face, and, to address them, they've opened a $60-million SoCal facility for your driving needs.
The Porsche Experience Center sprawls over 53 acres of Carson, California, with 4.1 miles of track featuring a lengthy straight away to build up speed, banked curves to fling around and a slalom course to swoosh through. A water hazard area simulates icy hill conditions by offering a low-friction slope that is constantly pumped with water (true luxury knows no drought) and features moving components precisely timed to randomly kick a car’s wheels causing skids and slides, forcing the driver to react.
You’ll be doing all this high-intensity driving in a fleet of Porsche’s cars. Right now, the Experience Center is stocked with 77 cars, some of them valued over $100,000 each. Drivers (who must all be 21 or over) are not allowed to bring their own cars, even Porsches, on to the tracks, but the facility will be working with local dealerships who might bring clients over for some super-intense test drives.
“We want to create an environment where you can feel, touch and value our brand,” Detlev von Platen of Porsche Motorsports told the L.A. Times. And if you decide you value the brand so much you want to buy a car of your own, they’ll help you out with that on site, too.
This is Porsche’s second such facility in the U.S., following a smaller one located near the company’s North American headquarters in Atlanta. They chose the site because a quarter of all Porsche sales in the world are made in Southern California alone.
Want to book your own Porsche experience, perhaps for a particularly thrilling bachelor party or birthday treat? Prices vary by vehicle and experience, but the minimum you’re looking at is $350 for a 90-minute session in a 911 Turbo. If you ever wanted to learn to drive stick, you can have a Porsche Personal Driving Coach teach you a Master the Manual class for $665. After your session, stay for a meal at either of the center’s two on-site restaurants. True car enthusiasts can even hold a wedding surrounded by classic vintage Porsche models.
Porsche Experience Center Los Angeles is located at 19800 South Main Street in Carson.
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