No Fixed Abode: The Case For Cloth

I should have known better than to get excited. My old friend Brian Makse posted a photo of a four-cylinder 718 Cayman S with what appeared to be a partial cloth seat. This is not something that TTAC readers will know about your humble author, but cloth interiors in Porsches are my thing, man. Long before Singer was charging $400,000 to put plaid door cards in an old 964, I had “cloth interior” on my list of things to find in my next Porsche. It’s a tough ask for any car from Weissach after 1982 or thereabouts, and in fact, of the three 9-somethings I’ve owned, only my 944 had anything besides leather on the seating surfaces.

So you can imagine my excitement when I saw cloth in (what should be) the entry-level Porsche. I was so worked up that I stopped doing what I was doing, which was building a Watkins Glen Grey Grand Sport with Hyper Green stripes online, and promptly pulled up the Porsche website to build a cloth Cayman of my very own. I kind of thought it would be a no-cost option to have a fabric seat, but I secretly hoped it was one of those options where you actually get some money back, like a sunroof delete.

You all know how naive this was on my part, right?

Let’s just get this out of the way: it’s not really cloth, and as Anna Gaye once told Marvin, it’s going to cost you. In fact, it’s going to cost you a minimum of $2,960. That’s the tab for “Sport Plus Seats With Sport-Tex Centers”. Sport-Tex appears to be a sort of fabric replacement using stranded vinyl. I’m going to try to look at it a bit closer in the near future; obviously I didn’t get an invite to the 718 event from which Brian had posted the photo.

If you choose the 18-way power seats with the “cloth” centers, the additional cost is $5,985. Listen, I’m a big fan of Porsche’s have-it-your-way philosophy. I admire the wide variety of options offered by the company, and if I decided to buy another new Porsche for some reason (like, say, a head injury severe enough to make me forget that the Cayman S costs as much as a Corvette Grand Sport), I would absolutely get a few of the special boxes checked. But six grand for fake cloth seats? Doesn’t that verge on the flat fucking insane?

I wonder if Porsche isn’t learning the wrong lessons from looking at what the Singer folks are doing. Singer, just in case you’ve been living in a cave with no exposure to Instagram since 2013, is the boutique (re)manufacturer that builds cheerfully colored and meticulously detailed tributes to vintage 911s using 1990-1994 Porsche 964-generation cars as a base. The resulting vehicles are sort of like listening to a Super Audio CD of the Berlin Philharmonic playing Bach on a $100,000 stereo system. Intellectually, you’re aware that the modern version is in fact far more perfect and dynamic and powerful than the original performance could have possibly been, but you’re okay with that because nothing exceeds like excess.

Singer has demonstrated that people will pay half a million dollars for a 964 Targa (street value in 2010: $15,000) if it hits all the right vintage notes and has absolutely perfect materials inside and out. There have only been two street Porsches to cost that kind of money: the Carrera GT and the 918 Spyder. Both of them were tough sells at the dealership — but Singer’s order books are full. I can see how the men of Zuffenhausen couldn’t help but cast an envious eye at Rob Dickinson’s Plaid Door Card People once in a while. And I can also kind of hear their inner monologue: If the old, inferior 964 is worth six figures with some nice fabrics and CNC-machined logos, shouldn’t we be able to charge six grand for cloth seats in a 718 Cayman that utterly destroys the 964 in every conceivable instrumented test?

Alas, Porsche is missing two crucial components of the Singer success story. The first is that the air-cooled 911 has, rightly or wrongly, become of the most important and desirable mechanical objects of the late 20th century. In the space of five days or so last week, I drove my old 993 and a brand-new 911 Turbo S with a sticker price of $200k or so — and if Porsche offered me the latter car as an even swap for my 1994-built beater, I’d say haha fuck no. The old cars were special. If you’ve driven them you know; if you haven’t, then go drive one and you’ll see.

It’s not fair, however, for me to endlessly castigate Porsche for not living up to its back catalogue. The air-cooled Porsche can’t meet modern regulations and it sure as hell can’t keep pace with even the basest of Boxsters now. It can’t be helped. But what can be helped, and what Porsche could easily learn from Singer, is the sense of whimsy and fun that exists in their re-created products. Go to Instagram (or wherever) and look at the interiors of the Singer cars. They are wacky, over-the-top, non-matching, deliberately eye-catching, iconoclastic. The fabrics are fun and the materials are mega and that’s all the alliteration I’m comfortable collecting for this current column.

The Six Thousand Dollar Seats in the 718 Cayman, by contrast, are boring and depressing-looking and just so serious and so impressed with themselves. It’s Porsche at its narcissistic, Kraftwerk worst. It reminds me of all the company’s well-known mistakes and all the times they’ve ignored their customers and all of the rest. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to the Corvette configurator.

Chevrolet could also do with a little more whimsy in its available options, particularly with regards to color. But at least they don’t make you pay $60,000 for a four-cylinder car. And they know what the customers really want. Maybe that explains why the various vintage re-creations of the ’60s Vettes don’t really have any traction at any price. The best Corvette is a new Corvette. If you can say that about your product, then I guess you don’t need cloth seats, do you?