I drove a $141,000 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S, the newest version of the iconic sports car. It was without question the best Porsche I've ever experienced.

Say hello to the 2020 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S, in a "Gentian Blue Metallic" paint job.

Price? $120,600, before extras. With extras and as-tested? $140,830.

Here are some of the Porsche 911's closest competitors:

• Porsche 718, the 911's little brother can be had for about $58,000 and change.
• Chevy Corvette C8, starting at around $60,000.
• Ford Mustang Shelby (in GT350, GT350R, or GT500 guise) opens around $61,500.
• Jaguar F-Type, with a base price nearing $63,000.
• Aston Martin Vantage, swooping in at roughly $156,000 to start.

The basic design of the 911 has been modified, modified, and modified some more since 1963, but the song remains the same.

Our bug-eyed buddy grew out of the People's Car of postwar Germany — it's the snazzier older brother of the VW Beetle.

The rearing-horse badge is familiar.

The LED headlights are quite effective for night driving, and the four-point daytime running light feature just looks cool.

Yes, well, nobody would argue that the 911 has an attractive rear end. The hump has gotten less humpy over the years. But it's still a hump.

See what I mean?

Viewed directly, it isn't so bad. Remember, the 911 has its engine and a pair of wide tires back here, requiring broad haunches. The dual-sport exhaust tips were silver-tipped in my tester. The exhaust tips you see sticking out of the rear bumper here are just decorative, though. The true exhaust ports sit farther back.

The full nameplate takes up prime real estate.

The tail lights are utterly unlike the headlights — sleek daggers.

The third brake light is innovatively positioned in the middle of the engine cover.

Ventilated disc brakes and flashy red calipers front ...

... and rear. These brakes are impeccable, and they aren't even top-of-the-line. The optional carbon ceramic brakes (not seen here) offer larger discs and calipers that fill up more space behind the wheels. And they're an expensive option, unnecessary for daily street driving.

My tester rode on Michelin Pilot Alpine winter tires. Sadly, I had no snow to test them out in.

The frunk. It's small. But I was able to cram a few days worth of groceries in.

We always weep that we can't show you the engine when we review a 911. But it is under there! The rear-engine design goes back to the era before the first 911s of the early 1960s. In the 4s, it's the classic boxer six, but with twin turbochargers, making 443 horsepower with 390 pound-feet of torque.

Fuel economy is exceptionally not good: 18 mpg city/23 highway/20 combined, according to the EPA. But I went through a tank rather quickly, while engaged in spirited driving. And even in mellow highway driving, you're still making use of the Porsche's passing power, which is bottomless and missile-like, so my sense was that 20 mpg, while plausible, is unlikely for most owners. And you're definitely going to want to gas up on premium fuel.

The power is piped through an eight-speed dual-clutch transmission to the superb all-wheel-drive system, which biases the rear rubber until it senses a need to move the traction around to counter slip and keep the car stable on the road.

Let's step inside. Just so you know, the new 911 has "self-presenting"door handles, which are sort of annoying.

Pretty snug in there! My test car had "Slate Gray/Chalk" leather interior that was easy to love.

The interior layout isn't minimalist, but there isn't much wasted space, either.

Matters are cozy for the passenger.

Yes! The 911's infamously terrible cupholder! It pops out, mid-dash.

But of course that's offset by the legendary stopwatch center-mounted on top of the dash.

The center console is dominated by another truly awful cupholder.

Yeah. Well ... yeah.

Anyway, there's also a moderately irritating toggle shifter. I will admit that once I got used to it, the thing wasn't so bad. The action is crisp.

There's simply no storage at all in this car.

There is an analog-digital instrument cluster and ...

... Porsche infotainment system, which runs off a central touchscreen.

If you've driven an older 911, having the equivalent of a small TV in the middle of the dash is jarring. But the system is bright, sharply rendered, and the interaction is snappy. Navigation was excellent.

There's also a suite of apps ...

... Plus a host of media options, from SiriusXM satellite radio to Bluetooth connectivity and USB input.

The rest of the controls take up very little real estate.

What about the back seat?

Hahahaha!

The blue paint job was right up my alley. The creamy interior, not so much. But it was pretty sweet, objectively speaking. The 911 also lives in a pleasing space between comfy and taut when it comes to the seats.

Time to fire this baby up!

The famous left-hand ignition-switch position no longer requires inserting the fob. BUT you still have to crank the 911. The flat six roars to life, and then depending on drive mode, a combination or natural engine note and sonic augmentation fills the cockpit.

For the driver, this is where the fun happens.

Drive modes are selected using the knob on the right side. Punch the center button and you get 20 seconds of screaming overboosted turbo oomph. It does slightly warp time in practice.

The 911 4S has Ordinary, Sport, Sport-Plus, and Individual modes. Most of the time, I was in Sport. I used Sport-Plus for 0-60 mph runs, and I fooled around with Individual, which allows for customization of suspension, steering, and throttle.

In Sport-Plus, the shifts are really held back, letting you taste the 7,500rpm redline. But it's harder to drive the car on civilian roads in this mode, and for me, it was more difficult to concentrate on the 911's handling. But, the engine burbles from the fully-opened exhaust ports are maximized in Sport-Plus.

It's a Porsche, so the tachometer is front and center. The screen to the right can be customized using a controller on the steering wheel.

Note the rather subdued paddle shifter. Obviously, these are worth it, if you want to wring all the thrills possible from the dual-clutch transmission. But I ended up favoring automatic mode quite a bit — the programming is superb. Every shift is perfectly correlated to torque demands.

So what's the verdict? I know, I gave it away already.

It's perfect. And by "perfect," I mean there's never been a better Porsche 911. When I first drove an all-wheel-drive 911, I thought it was like cheating. I enjoy a slightly tail-happy sports car, but I don't relish the experience of counter-steering my way out of slides when I'm throttling a powerful machine.

The up-tuned twin-turbo six in the 911 4S is so potent that I was glad it could add some traction as needed, vectoring it around to give me the confidence to carry speed into corners, brake hard, and power my way out — all while feeling the car planted beneath me in an almost absurdly confident way. The 4S is a machine that you really can push hard with the understanding that the entire package ardently wants to reassure you that what you think is aggression and risk is actually business as usual.

Engineering, engineering, engineering, and yet more engineering. That's what you're spending $141,000 on here. You're not paying for styling, because the 911 is basically unchanged from the 1963 version. You aren't paying for versatility, unless a nominal back seat and a wee frunk are your idea of versatile. You aren't paying for consumer technology — although the Porsche infotainment system is much improved, in the 911 it achieves what every other luxury setup on the market does. And you aren't paying for interior bling. While the 911 is certainly nice, it ain't plush.

Ferraris are more flamboyant, Lamborghinis are louder, Corvettes are more satisfyingly crude, Audi RS cars are more flexible, BMW M Sports and Mercedes-AMGs have more Teutonic stonk, Mustangs are wilder, the Nissan GT-R is a better everyday machine, and Aston Martins are, it goes without saying, more suave.

The 911 is none of that, but it is a masterpiece of subtraction, the ideal expression of form following function, and culmination of decades of making a technically "bad" design work. The motor shouldn't be atop the rear wheels. But it is. So what? It gets the job done, beautifully.

I do believe that there are horses for courses, and the 911 is my horse. I get in, buckle up, and the entire Gestalt is immediately familiar, right, and ready. In a few minutes, I'm back in my happy place. Learning curve: zero.

Or maybe less than zero, with the all-wheel-drive. I already find that the impeccable driving dynamics of 911s do a lot of work for me. I once explained that in my hands, the car almost draws its own lines to follow. And even when you press, the car holds those lines and continues to suggest them. There's a reason why many regard the 911 as the best amateur-street and professional-track sports car around.

If the 911 4S has a feature that sets it apart in this stratum of 911-ness (your next move-up is to the Turbo, and then the Turbo S), it's sheer speed. The 4S is really fast, with a 0-60 mph time that I clocked at about three seconds and a top speed of 190 mph. With powerful, quick cars, that kind of yee-ha is useful in a straight line (and fun) but not much in twisty windy navigation.

But with the 911 4S, you're invited to pour it on as you dive into curves, subduing them — in a sense, uncurving them. You'd have to gas it so hard into a corner to discombobulate the 911 suspension that it's sort of silly to even attempt to invoke lean or sway. No matter what I did, the car remained centered, a still point in a swirl of velocity.

Look, I already knew the 911 4S was good. Real good. No news there. What amazed me this time around was how Porsche somehow made it even better. This, folks, is stunning. They keep finding ways to improve perfection. Incredible. Spend the money, buy the car. Buy the best. Don't look back.