Quote:
Originally Posted by GuidoK
This is exactly the point I was trying to make.
And we all know that there came a new generation of cayenne and panamera, so porsche (or VAG) has chosen for volume sales.
And nowadays almost every brand does that, so people who think that porsche doesnt... they're wrong.
Even VAG themselves changed their opinion about that  |
Two major points here:
1). The generation-gap argument makes little practical and historical sense because since the early 1970s, Porsche and its related companies has been building cars -- and other things --
other than the 911 (and, before it, the 356) for nearly its entire history:
- Porsche Design, est. 1972
- Ferdinand Piech's engineering consultancy, est. 1972, which predated his move to Audi and eventual leadership of VW
- Ergo, the 914 joint project with VW during the same era (scuttled because of a change of leadership at VW)
- Ernst Fuhrmann's long-term vision of, and preference for, larger front-engined, watercooled products: the 924/928/944 -- which, I will add, was what Porsche envisioned itself as primarily producing as early as the early 1980s. Why did that stop? Primarily because Fuhrmann's replacement, Peter Schutz, was a hardcore 911 aficionado with embarrassingly short-term corporate goals that mainly revolved around the U.S. market.
2). Porsche building the Panamera and an SUV was looked at as heresy (including, initially, by yours truly), but it was in fact a shrewd move that has historical precedent within the company, as demonstrated by 1). above. Without the success of those models, the corporate support of VW AG, and the foresight to realize how badly mismanaged it had been in the late 1980s, the current 911 and the Boxster/Cayman would never have happened.
One bit of trivia/evidence to support all of this: The Boxster was designed around a flat 4-cylinder engine from the get-go, but the company didn't have the capital to design one for the car, so it shoehorned the existing flat six into it.
It is only this year getting the engine originally intended for it. So all of you Porschephiles who think the new engines in the Boxster/Cayman are heresy on the level of an SUV? You're all "flat" wrong -- that's what the car was originally intended to have!
(For the record, bigger heresy than a Porsche SUV: the ones from Jaguar and Alfa Romeo. Now THOSE are companies jumping on a bandwagon.)