#Porsche

There may be some debate as to whether the Cayenne saved Porsche, but there’s no denying its popularity. The growing number of powertrain and configuration options attest to that fact, and Porsche recently announced another. The Cayenne S E-Hybrid will land for the 2024 model year and will be available in coupe and SUV body styles. 

Porsche is adding some neat features to its smartphone-mirroring systems -- which has me wondering, what else can be added?

While certain other companies (ahem, General Motors, ahem) are busy and inexplicably running away from Apple CarPlay, brands like Porsche are making a concerted effort to further integrate the tool into their vehicles.

Today's UCOTD is a fairly simple one -- a 2006 Porsche Boxster with a manual transmission.

President and CEO of Porsche Cars North America, Kjell Gruner, has left the company. The former Porsche AG chief marketing officer took the wheel to oversee our region less than three years ago and has reportedly made an abrupt exodus. 

Today's TTAC rewind takes us back to a piece Jack wrote about doctors, Porsches, and moderation.

Today's used car of the day is a manual-transmission 2010 Porsche Cayman S that comes to us from Dallas.

A huge chunk of our recent UCOTD's have been, uh, reclamation projects. So for today, we're going high-end with a low-mileage 2019 Porsche Cayman S.

The Porsche 718 Spyder has always delivered a thrilling open-top driving experience, but there’s a new variant coming that promises to up the ante significantly. The 2024 718 Spyder RS borrows the 4.0-liter flat-six from the 718 Cayman GT4 RS and combines it with Porsche’s excellent seven-speed PDK transmission. Power output is prodigious, at 493 horsepower and 331 pound-feet of torque. 

Porsche will reportedly be raising prices between 4 and 8 percent on the European and U.S. markets during the second half of 2023 to cope with higher operating costs noted in its first-quarter earnings announcement. Even so, higher-end brands appear to be doing fairly well at present, and Porsche itself noted that operating profits rose to €1.84 billion ($2.03 billion USD) while revenue increased to €10.1 billion in Q1 — which is about 25 percent higher than they were last year.

We could debate whether the Cayenne saved Porsche until the cows come home, but there’s no denying the SUV’s appeal and popularity in the automaker’s lineup. The SUV’s getting a refresh for 2024, but it’s not the mild facelift we often see in the industry. Porsche’s giving the Cayenne better powertrains, a revised interior with more screens, and upgraded suspension.

We’ve been hearing about Porsche’s electric ambitions for a while, and the automaker has confirmed that the Macan will be powered by electrons soon. A short while ago, there were strong rumors that the automaker would build an ultra-high-end EV to slot in above the Cayenne, and it recently clarified how its next few years would play out from a product perspective.

Following news that the European Union had delayed voting on the prospective banning of the internal combustion engine, Porsche and Ferrari have reportedly been doing their utmost to encourage exemptions for synthetic fuels. Presented as an alternative to gasoline and diesel, “e-fuels” would theoretically allow the automakers to continue selling traditional engines while offering fuels they claim would be less harmful to the environment.

However, cutting through the industry rhetoric on this will be important. Despite assurances that synthetic fuels would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there are a lot of lingering questions about e-fuels.

Porsche is going electric, shifting decades of motorsport and engineering knowledge to completely novel propulsion systems and platforms. The Taycan arrived in 2020 with mind-bending performance, and we’ve seen spy images of an electric 718, so it’s not a huge surprise to learn that the automaker is planning an electric seven-seat SUV to compete with the latest and greatest from Mercedes and BMW. 

The Porsche 911 Dakar is set to join the ranks of ultra-cool but ultra-expensive and difficult-to-find models in the automaker’s vast catalog, but that hasn’t stopped it from offering upgrades for the car. To celebrate the car’s rally roots, Porsche announced a series of retro wraps inspired by the brand’s run in the East African Safari Rally and the Paris-Dakar Rally in the 1970s and 80s.