STYLE with SUBSTANCE
Do stickers and big wheels make the Porsche 718 Cayman better? No, but when they are free and the car is awesome anyway, it doesn’t matter!
The fourth-generation Porsche 718 Cayman came out seven years ago and is undeniably in the second half of its life span. So, what do you do to spark interest in a car that is trundling towards replacement, but not quite yet? That’s right — special editions!
So that’s why we now get the Porsche 718 Cayman Style Edition you see here. And, yes, that “style” mainly means stickers.
To be fair, it’s not just stickers; the Style Edition also comes with 20-inch alloy wheels that match the sticker colour (black or white), black stainless steel sports tailpipes with a high-gloss finish and contrasting stitching on the seats. The Boxster roadster version also gets its name embossed on the soft top near the A-pillar.
So how much does this relatively mild cosmetic upgrade cost? Well, absolutely nothing. That’s right; in a shocking turn of events, the 718 Style Editions cost exactly the same as their donor models.
This means the 718 Cayman you see here starts at $141,900 and packs a 220kW/380Nm 2.0-litre turbo four that will propel it to 100km/h from a standing start in 5.1 seconds in manual form, or 4.9 seconds for the dual clutch PDK automatic.
This particular car was fitted with both the PDK transmission ($4990) and the Sports Chrono Package ($3170) which dropped the 0-100 sprint to 4.7 seconds and bumped the price to $150,060.
So, do stripes, coloured wheels and a bit of stitching fundamentally change a car and justify a new road test of it? Absolutely not, but c’mon — it’s a Cayman, I was never gonna say no...
Anyway, the stylish bits do absolutely nothing to detract from the fundamentally brilliant nature of the Cayman, with all of that deliciously agile and responsive handling well in place. The boxer engine is a delightfully flexible unit that, while lacking the ultimate character of the sixes, still has a wonderfully belligerent roar when prodded into life and a distinctively horizontally opposed grumble that gives it a unique character all of its own.
It is also more than eager to deliver healthy performance when required while also being perfectly docile around town. Porsche has taken the MX-5 approach to the basic 718, endowing it with enough power to be fun and exhilarating, without going nuts with it, meaning it is superbly easy to live with, but just as eager as you are to get onto a winding back-road or a track day.
You can go fantastically hard in the 718 and have huge amounts of fun, all without even needing to break the speed limit. Oh, it can, of course. But you don’t actually need to to get the most fun out of it.
The chassis is, of course, utterly sublime, with fantastically balanced mid-engined dynamics and razor-sharp responses, without any of the old-school midengined on- the-limits terror of old. It feels agile, eager and utterly alive on the road, and is truly one of those rare cars that literally feel like an extension of your nervous system as you dive into corners with startling accuracy and communication.
Of course, being a standard Cayman under the stickers means it also features the same fiddly, almost useless cupholders and a dated, irritatingly messy infotainment system; but a sublime chassis with just the right amount of power easily makes up for such minor irritations.