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Originally Posted by Perfectlap
I don't understand why Porsche had to make the Boxster a different car to the Carrera at all.
With the cars being nearly the same from the seats forward, they could have simply called the Boxster the Carrera Roadster alla the Carrea Cabriolet or maybe even called it the Carrera MR and Carrera MR-S.
This way they could have avoided the whole 'putting a smaller engine' in the Boxster issue and simply stuck a 3.6 or 3.8 into the roadster.
The flood of Boxster sales that came in could have been spent to drive down the cost of Carrera engines and increase profits EVEN MORE. Why go through all the trouble of having to engineer an all new Boxer engine with all its expense and the added expense of having to revamp the engines in 2000? No doubt building an aditional 100,000 (already designed) Carrera engines would have made more money and made allot of Boxster customers happy. Two birds with one stone...
Did producing 2.5 and 2.7 engines really cost that much less than the 3.6 and 3.8? We aren't talking huge power differences here...
If I were in charge I would have every Porsche made running on the GT1 Race Block found only in the GT3 and TT, true dry sump. If you're going to build expensive sports cars...build expensive sports cars.
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Porsche already had the Cabriolet available for the wind-in-the-hair 911 folks, and sold that at something like a $10k PREMIUM over the price of the 911 coupe.
How could they possibly justify the price of a 911 Cab if they sold a Box with the same engine and the same, or better, performance at a price $20k LESS than the 911 coupe? They would have destroyed the market for the Cab, a model which accounts for over half the 911 sales in the US. Big, big loss in sales dollars.
The obvious answer is to hobble the bottom-of-the-line Boxster with an undersized (2.5 liter), underpowered (201hp at intro.) engine so that it would be no threat to the 911.
Their only mistake, marketing-wise, was that they made the early Boxster and the first-gen 996 Carrera TOO similar. From the front the only difference was the narrow air intake slit in the middle of the 996 bumper. It really ticked-off the 911 folks to have their $80k Carrera Cab mistaken for a $45k Boxster.