Quote:
Originally Posted by KRAM36
Beautiful ride PL. 
Had a lady in the drive thru windows ask if my Boxster was a 911 this morning lol.  |
You might have told her "it's the other way around, the 911 was the Boxster for that year".
First to market claims the fame...
Which is to say, a 996.1 is largely a 986 Boxster with the unfortunate disadvantage of the 911 having the engine in a subpotimal location, largey due to commercial considerations.
Although I think the 996 would have been better off just sticking with the exact look of the 993, so that you couldn't tell a 993 from a 996 from the outside. Today, the 993 might not have been as desirable to all but a few air-cooled diehards, since a big part of the 993 devotees are just after the high hips and round lights and could do witout the maintenance costs and hassles, not to mention the stress over mileage-induced depreciation they seem to fixate on. With tens of thousands of 996's that looked just like 993's rolling around the pricing game would have been a very good proposition for buyers who wanted 993 looks but wanted better 996 peformance and lower cost to maintain.
So in that respect the 996.1 owners who whinged that their new expensive car looked "just like the cheap Boxster" probably had some merit. Porche should have saved the 986/996 design revamp for a later series so that exterior and engine weren't both radically revamped in one fell swoop. First the engine (996.1 or 993.2), then the exterior (996.2). Then both at once with the 997.