A Porsche 911 Dakar will run you a quarter-million dollars, assuming you can find a dealer willing to sell one without a markup. KW Suspensions just dropped a coilover kit that gets you into safari 911 territory for about two percent of that price.
The German suspension specialist launched its V3 Safari Style line, covering the Porsche 996 and 997 generation 911s, the first-generation Porsche Cayenne, and VW Touareg. The 996 kit lists at $5,429, which is steep for coilovers but almost comically cheap compared to the car it’s imitating.
KW has been building similar setups on a custom basis for air-cooled 911s for years. The difference now is scale. A catalog part with a price tag and a part number is a fundamentally different product than a bespoke build requiring a phone call and a handshake.
The lift itself is modest. We’re talking 20 to 30 millimeters, roughly an inch to an inch and change. That’s not going to turn a Carrera 4S into a Baja truck, but it will buy you enough extra suspension travel and tire clearance to make dirt roads, gravel tracks, and cratered urban pavement feel less like acts of automotive self-harm.
The engineering underneath is where things get interesting. The V3 Safari Style retains independently adjustable low-speed compression and rebound damping, twelve clicks of compression and sixteen of rebound. That granularity lets owners dial in the ride so it doesn’t feel like a lifted jalopy on tarmac.
High-speed valves handle the ugly stuff, opening under increased damper shaft velocities on rough surfaces and letting damping force build more gradually instead of hammering through every impact. Composite spring seats and dirt-resistant trapezoidal threads round out the hardware. KW clearly designed this for people who want to drive their 911s on unpaved roads, not people who want to pretend they’re running the Dakar Rally.
Fitment covers the 996 Carrera 4 and Carrera 4S, and the 997 Carrera 2, 2S, 4, and 4S. The Cayenne and Touareg applications offer a slightly wider adjustment range, from zero to 30 millimeters up front and 5 to 30 at the rear. Useful, but nobody’s writing breathless forum posts about a lifted Cayenne.
The 996 is the real story here. These cars have spent two decades as the 911 the purists didn’t want. Prices stayed low because of the intermediate shaft bearing issue and the sin of water cooling, which made them the accessible entry point to the 911 world.
Now KW is making them the accessible entry point to the safari 911 world. Porsche built the Dakar as a limited-run halo car dripping with exclusivity. KW just made a kit that lets anyone with a 996 and five grand chase a version of the same idea.
It won’t have the factory skid plates or the rally-raid heritage, but it will have the look and enough capability to justify the aesthetic. KW also hinted that a VW Golf application and other vehicles are coming. The company is clearly betting that the safari trend has legs beyond the Porsche crowd, and that customers want factory-quality adjustability in a lifted package rather than crude spacer lifts from eBay.
Whether the 996 safari trend stays niche or explodes the way overlanding did with trucks five years ago depends entirely on how many of these kits KW can move in the first year.
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