In my last article, I wrote about a friend buying a Porsche Boxster. Since he is a family man with young children, this means leaving half the brood at home while you have all the fun alone with one kid, while the rest turns the home upside down. After a few such episodes, any sane person would just leave the fun car at home and drive the boring Honda, just to make sure the kids don’t kill each other. While you might think the choice is rather simple, there is more to that.

Nice ~ Mike

Any responsible father today having fed a diet of CSI or Criminal Minds and a host of other shows, knows that the days of bringing your children up carelessly are over. In these times, it is either you do your utmost to ensure fairness by bringing the whole brood or the risk of one or more of the kids being set on the path be being sociopaths later in life. All because “dad brought me in his yellow sports one time less that my brother”. So no responsible father would want that on his head. It is either everyone goes in SUV or nobody goes. And so, the yellow sports car sits at home, begging to be driven.

Which brings us to sports cars that are not really sports cars. You see, companies that make sports car know that. They know that responsible middle age men, have families to take care off and don’t want to dump them while they are having fun during the weekends. They know that such men think of their wives, children, maid, in-laws, dogs and cats. Sports car companies also know that today, such men would choose a boring Japanese car without a second thought, if they have to choose between bringing the family and a having a spin in the sports car.

Perhaps, it is because they watch movies with sad lines like “Family means no one gets left behind.” I think it came from some cartoon about space monsters from another planet that landed on earth or something like that. Even the most insensitive men would melt if their daughter told that to their face. So car companies that specialize in sports cars including Porsche, Lamborghini and Ferrari all know that. They know they can never compete with Stitch. So have to adapt or go the way of the dodo.

Although, I can’t, in a million years, fathom why someone would want such a car in the first place. I mean, the real reason for a sports car is so that you CAN leave your wife, your children, your maid, your in-laws, your dog and cat at home. It is so that you can de-stress and have some fun all by yourself, male bonding with other men. After all, you have worked your butt off so you can afford a sports car in the first place. You signed up to a fan club so that you can learn to drive the car properly and have a blast driving to nowhere, blowing away some hard earned cash so that maybe, just maybe, get the attention you never had when you were younger. You were probably doing all the right things and were mugging your books instead of having fun dating all the girls you can.

Which is why, today, you see all manners of sports cars that have 4 seat. Don’t blame Porsche. They would have been content to just keep on selling the 911 until judgement day. Other car companies started this ball rolling and once it started, there was no stopping it. Porsche’s marketing people began telling the engineers they need to come up with something else besides the 2 door, 2 seat offering. It is bad enough to have a 4 seater sports car, a SUV is really going in the deep end. It the beginning, a lot of Porsche fans thought they were nuts. The cost of developing a SUV will surely sink Porsche. Nobody will want one. It was a big gamble then. Off course, the naysayers were proven wrong. The Cayenne was Porsche’s proverbial silver lined cloud. It single handedly saved Porsche. I’ve never seen so many Porsche’s in my life in town. A visitor would think that money grew on trees just by looking at the number of Cayennes. If you take all the Cayennes off the road, however, then you would probably run into a real 2 seater Porsche, once a week or less.

Porsche was not the first car company that came up with the idea of more people and more stuff in a sports car. If memory serves me right, Ferrari had one way back. One model even had automatic transmission, for crying out loud. Lamborghini had one too. These were back in the days when SUVs did not even exist. Now, every sports car maker have one or more.

Which brings me to the Panamera. The Panamera is for someone who wants a throughbred sports car and want to ferry everyone in it as well. But somehow the designers wanted to tell the world that a Panamera is just as good as a sports car as the legendary 911. Not that it is not fast enough. The basic V6 Panamera “only” has 300 bhp and does 0 to 100km/h in just over 5 seconds and goes to 280 km/h. The top end model V8 has close to 500bhp.

Bad ~ Mike

For the Cayenne, the designers must have thought “let’s work on the front end so that our customers will know it is a Porsche” This resulted in the now unmistakable tall car with a large front grill, huge wide tires and a can that probably can’t mount a kerb without ripping the expensive low profile tires. Instead of letting the specifications speak for the car, the designers thought, let do better. Let’s make it look like a 911. And so, what normally happens to things that looks good on paper, you now have the, ahem, ah, Panamera, that don’t look in the flesh. From some angles, you would think it is a Boxster. Move slightly to the back, you’d think it is a 911. Walk further back, you would know what to think anymore!

Not too bad ~ Mike

Directly behind, it has some semblance to a 911. Not too bad. Move a bit to either side and you’ll probably think more than twice to pull out your cheque book. It just doesn’t do justice for the Porsche logo to be stuck on it. Not to say that it is hideous. Far from it, but it just doesn’t work together. That is why, you see so little photographs online from the third quarter view. Most of the photos you find online only shows the front half.

Keep your cheque book – Mike

pic credit Zanthia & Fabio Aro via flickr

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