Fans of Porsche’s mid-engined sports car will have to wait much longer for a new version.
While we’ve come to expect new versions of the Boxster and Cayman to follow the year after a new 911 chassis debuts, that’s apparently not the case this time around. Road & Track spoke to Porsche’s August Achleitner at the Geneva Motor Show, and he revealed the surprising development (or the lack thereof).
Even-more-stringent Euro 7 emissions laws are set to take effect very soon, which will have a profound effect on sports car manufacturers. In Achleitner’s words, “The situation in Europe isn’t really fun because there’s a trend to change these requirements with dramatic speed, which does not fit at all to development times in the automotive industry.”
In other words, when politicians make engineering decisions, it’s a bad time for manufacturers and consumers alike. Still, it seems that Porsche would like to keep the Boxster and Cayman around – we’ll just have to wait a little while for a new one. That’s fine by us, quite honestly.
While the current 718 Boxster and Cayman’s basic architecture dates back to 2012, it’s hardly what we’d call “dated.” In fact, we’d say it’s still the best mid-engine sports car out there (Road & Track’s Chris Perkins agrees). Plus, it’s a comparatively low-volume car for Porsche, so they won’t be paying off whatever development money they do spend any time soon.
In the meantime, we expect Porsche to continually update the aging sports cars with special editions like the upcoming Cayman GT4. According to Achleitner, the current car will stick around until at least 2023. To look at it in a glass-half-full sort of way, we get another four years of one of Porsche’s greatest cars.
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