What is it?
The new top-range Porsche Boxster, a car that gets the hallowed GTS badge slapped on its rump - first used by the iconic 904GTS half a century ago - and for which Porsche is asking only an additional £5840.
In Porsche terms £5840 is not a lot of money. You can spend over half that much just choosing metallic paint, sat nav and a digital radio from the Boxster’s options list. But that’s also the price Porsche is asking to trade up from a standard Boxster S to this new GTS model.
In pure equipment terms it seems there is very little choice to be made here: if you gave a Boxster S the Porsche Active Suspension Management (PASM), 20-inch rims, the Sport Chrono Pack, sports seats and dynamic headlights the GTS offers as standard, you’d already have burned through almost all the additional money.
That’s without considering the GTS’s additional 15bhp, 10lb ft of torque, unique suspension tune and standard active engine mounts.
The GTS also comes with a mildly revised front bumper and rear valence of the squint-and-you’ll-see-it variety.
It costs £52,879 which might seem like a lot for Boxster but really isn’t very much at all when you consider it’s £30,000 less than Porsche will charge you for the cheapest 911 cabrio, a car powered by near enough the same engine but is slower because of its extra weight, whatever the official figures might say.
The other reason for choosing a GTS over an S is perhaps less rational, but no less real for that. The very existence of the GTS demotes the S from the top of the range offering to a middle order car, and for convertible buyers who like not only to be seen, but to be seen in the best, that’s a privilege for which £5840 may seem like a very small price to pay.
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No PASM button?
As for 20" alloys, these are certainly no issue in my Boxster S with PASM. Indeed the ride is much better than in my old Audi TT on 19" alloys.
toyota GTS
but of course
That MR2 was a Boxster rip-off in the first place!
I wonder why bigger wheels