The saga of Porsche’s next-generation 718 Cayman and Boxster has been … confusing. Back in 2022, Porsche confirmed the car would go from a mid-engine, gas-powered car to a full EV to satisfy upcoming emissions regulations in the EU, despite no one asking for such a car.
As demand for electric cars has steadily leveled out, Porsche stuck to its guns until this past September, when it revealed during an investor presentation that “top” versions of the gas-powered 718, like the GT4 RS and Spyder RS, would remain in production, with the new EV-platformed cars occupying the rest of the range.
Now, there’s a new report from Autocar claiming Porsche has decided to reverse-engineer the electric 718 to accept a mid-mounted gas engine in what feels like one of the biggest switch-ups I’ve ever seen this far into a car’s development.
I Feel So Bad For Porsche Engineers
As with most electric platforms, the PPE Sport architecture used in the electric 718 was never meant to accept an engine of any kind. This means Porsche engineers have to, essentially, go back to the drawing board to figure out how to make the car work. It feels reminiscent of Fiat’s recent move with the all-electric 500, which was re-engineered to take a hybrid powertrain. From Autocar:
Achieving that will be no small task. The PPE Sport platform uses a stressed, load-bearing battery pack and a flat floor, so removing the battery would significantly weaken the entire bodyshell.
As a result, the proposal from Porsche engineers centres on developing a new structural floor section that bolts into the platform’s existing hard points, effectively adding the rigidity back in. A redesigned rear bulkhead and subframe will then support the engine and transmission, Autocar has been told.
It’s not just the engine and the chassis engineers have to rejigger. There’s also the rest of the stuff ICE-powered cars need to function. Things you don’t really think about until you have to fit the stuff into a car that was never meant to have any of it:
Major packaging constraints remain, not least because the electric structure provides no central tunnel, nor provision for a fuel tank, fuel lines or exhaust system. Engineers suggest these measures require the development of a completely new rear section because the architecture was never designed for a petrol engine.
As for which engine the newly gas-powered 718 will receive, Porsche hasn’t decided, according to Autocar. The publication suggests a new version of the 4.0-liter naturally aspirated flat-six, first introduced in 2020, is a “leading candidate.” Personally, I think that’s a good idea. The turbo flat-fours in the base models were fine, but pretty forgettable compared to the much better-sounding flat-six. Not that Porsche is taking my advice, or anything.
So Why Now?
The market hasn’t been shy about showing automakers it’s not very interested in electric sports cars. Maserati canceled the electric version of its MC20 over a lack of demand. Rimac said last year its Nevera was such a sales flop that it might not make another electric hypercar.
Despite those signals, Porsche stuck to its guns with the electric 718 up until now. If I had to guess why, it’s because that car was already so far along in the development cycle. The company had running prototypes on the road as far back as 2019. Engineers have spent a lot of time trying to get this thing right, and now, it sounds like their work is about to be shelved so some version of the car can survive.
If I had to guess, this move is probably part of Porsche’s “strategic realignment,” which it announced in September. The “significant adjustments” to the company’s product portfolio in the medium- and long-term include a new gas-powered Macan and making its upcoming three-row SUV, which was supposed to be an EV, into a hybrid. There was also a line in there about its upcoming electric cars being “rescheduled.”
In that announcement, Porsche reaffirmed plans to nevertheless offer an all-electric version of the 718. But since then, the company revealed CEO Oliver Blume will be stepping down at the end of December, with former McLaren CEO and Ferrari CTO Michael Leiters set to replace him. So who knows just how much has changed in these few months.
While I feel bad for Porsche engineers, I think this is probably the only viable way forward for the 718, at least in the near term. I’m sure an electric version would’ve been quicker, but no one would’ve bought it. Meanwhile, the gas-powered version is one of the greatest modern sports cars of all time. To hear that it’s possibly getting a new model is good news.
Top graphic image: Porsche
Here’s a thought – why not just keep building the perfectly delightful current one? Nobody was asking for an electric 718, government were mandating it. And those mandates are going the way of the dodo bird.
You know how EV’s that are just “retrofitted” into an existing ICE platform aren’t typically very good EV’s? This is the the same thing in reverse.
I fully expect the ICE version built on the EV platform to have significant compromises, which will be a disaster since you have the excellent previous gen to compare it to.
As a fan of EVs even I was like “huh?” when Porsche said their rear engined sports cars would be EVs, like I saw those at the type of cars gas aficionados would have to look forward to as their weekend cars. Like how horses are now kept for recreation.
Electify the commuter offerings but the lower volume sports cars just keep on keeping on, with manuals!
How do they know no one will buy it when they have not even made it?
Renault faced similar with the Zoe, and ended up selling lots.
Price of petrol / gas in Europe is still €1.50 a litre, where as before Russian invasion of Ukraine it was €1 a litre.
Not likely to go down either.
Not much good having a Porsche if it is too expensive to run.
If you can afford a Porsche in the first place, you can afford to feed it. And have some electric commuter crapcan on the side too.
I’m genuinely confused as to how reverse engineering the electric 718 platform is more effective than doing an emergency update on the current ICE 718 platform. Obviously there are manufuacturing considerations, like the capacity for both may not be feasible, but if they’re going to be continuing to make the GT4 718s, why not do a good update to the existing platform? Surely the weight and packaging penalties caused by overhauling the EV-Only platform will be worse than a half-baked update to the ICE only platform.
Editing to add: It’s not like VW group is completely allergic to writing off engineering work either. They wrote off something like 8 Billion on the CARiAD software disaster before spending an additional 2B on Rivian equity to gain access to their software, and I can guarantee the EV 718 cost far less than 10B to develop. Sure an overhaul of the current ICE 718 wouldn’t be cheap, but there’s also certainly a large number of people who would willingly buy a 718 with slightly updated styling and a 20hp bump up and down the range without much else in the way of chassis changes. It’s still a great car, why build a compromised successor on a new platform when the old bones are still valid?
Yeah, I think this is the correct take. It’s like what they are having to do with both the Macan EV/ICE and the Cayenne EV/ICE. They are two separate platforms sharing the same size and nameplate. I’m guessing they’ve committed to production such that using the current 718 platform isn’t possible to also produce the new EV version.
That’s likely the key that I was forgetting, supply chain commitments with established OEMs are pretty wide ranging. The German brands especially use a lot of third party OEs like Bosch and Continental for a large portion of their smaller parts, belts, tires, electronics modules, brake and steering boosters/motors.
This is why so many German car manufacturers are throwing rear wheel steer on so many cars, the OEs developed it and basically said “hey you want certain parts developed, you need to buy some rear-steer systems too.” The EV 718 platform probably has a ton of these components that don’t fit in the ICE 718 platform that already have contracts signed and volumes agreed to.
This is the biggest advantage the upstart brands like Lucid, Rivian and Tesla have, as well as Hyundai/Kia. They’re all almost entirely vertically integrated and control their own supply chain destiny, so any and all parts changes can be implemented much more quickly and allows faster responses to market conditions. It’s why Hyundai and Kia have so much tech for the money too, they can make it all in house and not pad the pockets of 3rd party suppliers for all the modules.
Going all in on EV’s was a gamble. It was an educated guess and a hope that it would be the logical next step. It didn’t pan out. That’s gambling for you.
I want an EV sports or roadster in the future would be nice to replace the Polestar 2 with one but at this point that will most likely get replaced by an R3X or Scout if those ever materialize and are affordable when slightly used haha
Built an inexpensive, lightweight, Miata-sized or smaller, driver-engaging car with minimal bells and whistles, that takes advantage of drag reduction to maximize the efficiency of the vehicle so that acceptable range can be attained with a small, lightweight battery(you’re going to need a CdA of under 0.4 m^2), keep the entire package under 2,500 lbs with 250+ peak horsepower on board, get 200+ miles range at 70 mph on a 40 kWh or smaller battery, gear it for a top speed of at least 160 mph, and come in with a price tag of say under $50k, and you won’t be able to beat away the rush of enthusiasts.
The Chinese are already doing something slightly similar for $30k right now. What I described above was borderline possible with 1990s tech when regulations weren’t as strict, and the batteries are 5x more energy dense by mass today.
Stop building oversized, feature-laden, lardass cars that pretend to be sporty, whether EV or ICE, and marketing them as “sports cars”. Make them SMALL and NIMBLE again. If it is wider or taller than a Miata ND, start over, because it should be lower and more narrow than a Miata ND.
I get the Chinese have something like that over there but would that pass US safety standards?
Also with EVs lots of people are looking at range. Look at the mini EV that is a smaller lighter EV but it only got a range of 114 miles which isnt even the real world range. I am driving my EV currently in the cold spell we got in Chicagoland currently and my economy went from about 30kwh/100 miles in the summer to as low at 48kwh/100 miles in the winter.
Consider that the Mini’s CdA value is almost double that of the VW XL1. That is going to have a massive impact on its highway range, for the worse.
The GM EV1’s EPA range was worse than its real-world range because the testing procedure has a lot of stop and go(which is atypical when driving long distance on US interstates, where long range is moist important), but at 70 mph, it could get roughly a 150 mile range on a 26.4 kWh battery. This was in 1999, and the car came in at 2,900 lbs. The EPA rates it at 105 miles range.
Compare the EV1 to the Mini, the Mini having a comparatively massive 40 kWh pack. It has a 50% bigger pack than the EV1, for the same EPA range, and worse real-world interstate range than the EV1 at 70mph. It also weighs 3,500 lbs and has almost twice the EV1’s aero drag.
The EV1 is far from the best we can do aerodynamically for a small sports car. The best possible aero was ultimately cast aside for styling according to “The Car that Could: The Inside Story of GM’s Revolutionary Electric Vehicle” by Michael Shnayerson. And today’s batteries are 5x as energy dense by mass versus what the EV1 had.
I don’t think safety regulations are the issue when the Miata can pass them today. A 40 kWh battery will be about the same mass as the Miata’s engine, and a 250 peak horsepower electric motor and control system will weigh less than a Miata’s transmission+driveshaft+differential. I can’t speak for the SC01 from China on safety because as far as I’m aware, it has never been tested in the USA.
There isn’t much getting around winter range reduction. There are battery heating systems that can help, and in the best of circumstances, you might only lose 20%.
So, real question, is it possible this means the Taycan variants might get cheaper? Or nah, bc Porch.
If anything they’ll jack those up to recoup some of their development costs on the Cayman.
In related news, the US Air Force has decided against retiring the venerable A-10 Warthog and is instead planning to retrofit its 22-foot-long GAU-8 machine gun to be used as a Candy Distribution Device for war-torn areas.
Brrrrrrrrt
Mmmm. Depleted uranium lollipops.
It has funny angry cartoon shark face painted on the front so obviously it is bringing happiness and rainbows! /S (also I love the A-10 such a cool ass plane love a lot of military aircraft the knowledge that has gone into them is ridiculous)
Don’t forget the gummy cluster bombs.
Those are against the Geneva Convention!
That was the meeting that Nestle set up last year to ensure their products get top billing in all humanitarian work. Wonka and Brachs were LIVID.
I’m having visions of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. For Christmas they replaced the downed helicopter at the center of the map with a toppled Christmas tree. The air strike kill streak reward dropped explosive presents with an evil HO HO HO and jingle bells from Santa. Good times.
https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/Winter_Crash
Major packaging constraints remain, not least because the electric structure provides no central tunnel, nor provision for a fuel tank, fuel lines or exhaust system. Engineers suggest these measures require the development of a completely new rear section because the architecture was never designed for a petrol engine.
Interesting. Porsche usually doesn’t paint itself into a corner, and always tries to give itself an out. Probably due to the comparative lack of volume, they didn’t this time.
Ouch.
I believe the statement. You can’t just rip a platform apart… mostly because you ALREADY DESIGNED EVERYTHING ELSE AROUND IT. Only needing a rear makes sense as there’s probably some cleverness possible for everything else, but even then, you still have cooling lines to route to the front, etc. Heck, a lot of existing mid-engine cars have three radiators up front, more if you include other heat exchangers in the rear section. You need room to run that stuff.
They’re still going to have challenges though. As it stands, the 981/982 platform. which has its roots going back to technically the late 2000s (development likely started) — still has 90% of the torsional rigidity of a McLaren with a carbon tub. You can’t half ass that, especially when you try to do better next gen.
Curious to what engineers have possibly been thrown onto this in the past year. As it won’t be just any of them, but the ones that really know their stuff.
The Mission R on Iracing is one of the least popular and most annoying cars on the sim
I mean an EV Boxster/Cayman is a cool engineering exercise and I actually do think there will be some level of a market for a small, as light as possible, BEV roadster, since when you think of the classic British drop tops and the Miata/even Toyobaru the powertrain has never been the main draw…or really much of any draw, the majority of small, light, tossable roadsters and coupes are 4 cylinder anyway. I know a manual transmission is a big part of the appeal (that even me and my notorious indifference towards manuals agrees with)…but you’d be shocked and disappointed at how many Toyobarus and Miatas are automatic.
I don’t see how an EV would serve the folks who buy those any worse. But with that out of the way, there is no market for a likely six figure EV sports car. The people that can afford them almost certainly already have an EV if they’re interested in one and I’m sure the average 718 that’s sold is someone’s 3rd or 4th car anyway. I’m more pro electrification than a lot of folks here but I don’t really see the point in electrifying niche sports cars that get driven maybe 5,000 miles a year at most.
We should electrify every single commuter, family hauler, etc. But sports cars? I don’t really see the point. Their emissions are such infinitesimal drops in the Olympic swimming pool that I think the battery resources can go way further elsewhere.
Maybe for the general population, but I think an electric Miata would be boring.
What I love the most about my NB Miata is the NVH, revving the shit out it, and shifting those short ratios.
My other cars are EVs, and they’re awesome. But when I want to feel something, I drive the Miata.
I was specifically talking about the people that buy those sorts of cars with automatics, which is a surprising quantity.
Keep making the old Boxster/Cayman, throw some limited edition colors on it, call it the “Porsche Heritage Edition”, and charge $20K more.
Crisis averted in the most Porsche way possible.
Can’t. Doesn’t meet multiple EU regs, and not on emissions, either. I believe they were “Cybersecurity” regulations. The mid-engine platform was the last one they could have evade it for a while, but even the door closed on that as well.
It locked out at least the EU, UK and I think China. Which means you’re basically selling a US-only car, and still have customer demands for safety, global emissions regulations, etc.. Not going to happen.
Does it matter…now or later…it’s going to have to get done. Contrary to all of these doom and gloom articles on the state of global EV affairs, it would be suicide to cease all progress, because many of the manufacturers are still moving forward at full speed. Adapt, or become extinct. It happened to the dinosaurs you know.
One of the bigger heads of VW Group — Mate Rimac — would disagree. The man who built the Nevera, and wanted to build 250 of them, has gone on record multiple times they’ll be lucky to ever sell 75 of them. They hit a wall right around 50.
No one wants them. Those were “the best of the best’ at the time as well.
He’s part of why the Bugatti Tourbillion has an N.A. V16. He already learned the hard way, and made sure Bugatti didn’t learn it as well.
I’ve talked to enough people on the Porsche sales side. How many Mission X hypercars could they have sold? Very, very few. Probably fewer than 50.
Porsche’s not looking to set billions more on fire producing cars that will rot, or for R&D that will partially pay off at best, since the goalposts of “greatness” will keep moving on BEVs for decades and decades into the future.
This is exactly what some of us have been saying would happen since it was first announced.
I will be a bigger person and not respond in kind to the many angry and rude comments I’ve received for mocking this prediction (and EV uptake in general) over the years.
While I’ve been bearish on EVs forever, I would have argued that retrofitting an EV for an ICE powertrain would be so prohibitively expensive that nobody would even bother.
I stand corrected, and it’s the brand I would have guessed if you’d held a gun to my head.
What exactly do you think happened here? A maker of fairly low volume sports cars applied the brakes slightly. Mass consumer automotive manufacturing has not, except if you received the blessing from the Orange One in the US.
Maybe you weren’t around in 2018-22 online, when predictions of anything other than 100% EV dominance by now was mercilessly mocked by correct-thinkers such as yourself.
It was crazy then, it is crazy now, and it isn’t just sports cars.
I think Akio Toyoda’s way-too-obvious explanation earlier this year sealed the deal for the masses. Basically “Why build a full EV when I can build 60-90 hybrids with the same battery volume?”
Porsche is obviously a much different user base, but even there, people clearly aren’t sold on the idea of full EVs. My best guess is a lot of them do want some longevity, resale, and more “feel” from the car than most EVs can offer. I just can’t imagine the 2080-era listings on Bring a Flying Trailer evoking that much nostalgia for early 2020s Porsche EVs.
I am not a new Porsche buyer and never have been, but I have to believe people start wondering what makes a Porsche so special without a unique powertrain.
The sounds and sensations from an EV Cayman aren’t going to be appreciably different than those from an EV Hyundai. No shade to Hyundai, but that kind of thing isn’t going to help sell Porsches.
I call bullshit. They’ll just continue to use the MMB platform (same as the 911) for the new gasoline powered versions and the electric platform will still remain only for electric versions.
I did not realize really expensive Porsches got driven enough that EV or ICE made a difference. (snark?)
I see Caymans and Boxsters all the time – I would argue they’re probably the Porsche sports car that actually gets driven the most.
I browse used 718s all the time and it’s not uncommon at all to see six figure mileage. I think 911s are much more likely to be garage queens, especially with the endless MY 911 BEST 911 variants. The Boxster/Cayman will always have a reputation for being “the lesser Porsche sports car” and as a result they often get driven. Hell my buddy has a 718 GT4 RS and he’s both thrown me the keys to before and tracked it.
1 of 1 no lowballers I know what I got etc etc
> Hell my buddy has a 718 GT4 RS and he’s both thrown me the keys to before and tracked it.
Which scenario had the higher Vmax? 😀
Sadly tracking it. He let me rip it a few times in a residential area but was, understandably, hesitant about letting me really open it up. I’m hoping to join him for a track day eventually but I uh…don’t think offering him seat time in the Kona N is going to make for a particularly fair exchange.
Yes those are not the really expensive ones.
I dunno. If the EV version cost the same, i bet it would sell just fine, especially if it still felt like a porsche.
The Boxter/Cayman are the aspirational “I finally did it. I finally bought a Porsche.” vehicles for the people who buy them.
What i bet was going to happen was they were going to jack the price up of the EV and then all their market research told them their target market was going to disappear so they backpedaled. Bolting on a subframe member or 2 and using an existing engine and drivetrain is likely quite a bit cheaper than outfitting a battery. Now they can jack the price up even more on the EV version in the name of segment differentiation.
It sucks for the engineers, but this really is the only way to go with this platform. Although they’ll have sunk so much money into the development of this thing I’m guessing it starts at close to $100k by the time all is said and done.
There’s a reason cars take years to develop. Is there any way to do something like this that doesn’t result in a compromised final product? Instead of making a square peg fit in a round hole, it almost seems like they should just evolve the current 718 platform. Kinda like they’ve been doing with the 911 platform since the dawn of time. I’m also not an engineer, so I know next to nothing.
I am an engineer and have some background in working with auto OEMs, and I also have no idea why they are not doing this. Granted I have never been employed by an automotive OEM, so I can’t speak to the full suite of reasons, but as I understand it, updating an existing ICE architecture should be leaps and bounds easier and cheaper than trying to retrofit an EV architecture for an ICE powertrain.
This is wild. I always loosely understood the idea of shoving an EV or hybrid powertrain into something designed as an ICE vehicle. While not ideal, it was usually doable because you’re essentially replacing a motor and a fuel source with different ones.
But if you look at cars like Tesla and Rivian, bespoke EVs aren’t really made to go the other way around. I just don’t see this ending well for a car not designed or packaged to do this.
I mean if Rich Rebuilds can do it, Porsche should be able to pull it off in three YouTube videos!
Ultrarich Rebuilds!