RICHARD MEADEN
The last new petrol-engined Boxster is a pivotal moment, says Meaden
YOU MAY HAVE READ THE FIRST DRIVE review of the Porsche 718 Spyder RS in an earlier issue. Much like everything else I seem to write these days, it marks the end of an era. In this instance the last new Boxster to be powered by a petrol engine.
Until now there hasn’t really been a moment we can point to that indicates a truly pivotal transition to EV. At least not in the pernickety, performance and dynamics-focused evosphere. Porsche committing to battery power for its entry-level sports cars changes all that. It certainly can’t have been an easy decision.
The problem for Porsche – and indeed every other performance brand that builds cars noted for their powertrains – is that they are replacing perfected hardware with new technology. Tech that’s nowhere near as evolved, yet advancing at an extraordinary rate. Development lead times have always been the automotive engineer’s great frustration, but three or four years creating a new platform sees little change in combustion-engine development. Imagine the likely advances in battery technology over that same period and you can see how cars could now be rendered obsolete before they get launched.
Another problem for sports and supercar makers is that EV powertrains give us way more performance, which is the one thing we don’t need. Worse, EVs rob us of all the things we crave – occasion, character and engagement in smaller, lighter cars. I’d like to tell you that the industry has a real grasp on this paradox, but whenever I meet automotive engineers and product planners they’re all struggling with it just as much as we are.
It’s perhaps an over-simplification of our great shared passion, but when it comes to cars and kudos, cylinders matter. I’m fortunate to have driven pretty much every permutation of cylinder count and configuration, from 1-litre Fiat TwinAir to 8-litre Bugatti W16. You can also add rotary, turbocharged, supercharged and even twin-charged to that list. It’s that extraordinary range that means many of us treat car ownership as an opportunity to explore and experience their unique characters. In an EV world that stimulation and fascination will be gone.
If we’re honest, the performance car ecosystem has required a reset for years. Going faster with less effort is not what The Thrill of Driving is about, yet fundamentally that’s what car makers have been offering us for more than a century. Because the progression has been in small increments, it’s only in the last decade or so that we have begun to rail against the ‘more is more’ mantra and say that enough is enough.
Now we’re in a situation where internal combustion is being legislated out of existence, with the cars we’re all being steered towards having twice the power of our old steeds. If you’re a product planner or sales director working in an industry that has been built on selling people new models on the basis that they have more power and performance, this should be an absolute gift. But whenever I speak to people in those kinds of roles they’re all quietly questioning where we go from here.
I wouldn’t normally point to Nürburgring lap times as a barometer of anything meaningful, but when a near-2000bhp Rimac Nevera hypercar is just 20 seconds faster than a Tesla Model S Plaid around the Nordschleife, you know our world is bent out of shape. Especially when the Rimac’s 7:05 lap time is still a couple of seconds off a 500bhp Cayman GT4 RS. No disrespect to Rimac. It’s doing amazing things, and ultimately only acting on the age-old engineer’s impulse of making an already fast thing go even faster. Still, I can’t help thinking the recent exercise at the Nürburgring is emblematic of an industry that’s chasing its tail.
What will we make of the new Boxster and Cayman? Worryingly, I’m reminded of the absolute roasting we gave Porsche when it introduced the 2-litre four-cylinder boxer engine in the 718 Cayman and Boxster. Undeniably effective but possessed of a thrummy engine note, it is generally regarded as the poor relation compared to the sonorous, sweet-spinning flat-six. That’s not a good omen.
Knowing the way Porsche does things, and having experienced the Cayman GT4 e-Performance last year, I have every faith that the new models will stop and steer better than any EV before. What I’m less convinced of is whether the overall experience will contain enough emotion or require enough from the driver to truly hold our attention in the way sports cars always have. Applying the curiosity factor that drives us to experience different petrol engines means some of you might be tempted to buy (or more likely lease) one. Whether the experience is sufficiently compelling for you to want to buy another is the real acid test, and ultimately on what the future of the sports car depends. ⌧
EVs give us way more performance, which is the one thing we don’t need