But there is plenty of room for two people, with seemingly infinite adjustability from seats that offer superb support and comfort. There’s good hip room, good thigh room, good shoulder room. It is an exquisite cabin, but it’s designed for driving, not so much for touring. That said, the front and rear trunks do hold a useful amount of luggage when asked.
We drove both the 718 Boxster and 718 Boxster S on a combination of high-speed highways and absurdly twisty roads in Portugal’s Coastal Lisbon region for several hours, supplemented by some high performance manoeuvres at a military airforce base. It was a good day, all around.
No, the engine doesn’t sound like a “six.” A turbine whine is indeed not a feature of four-cylinders, but a tuned snarl can be, as can a willing wail (the car uses a new exhaust system, front to back, and will rev to 7,500, according to Porsche engineers at the press launch). From inside the car, I liked the sound just fine.
The Sport Exhaust (it’ll add a few dollars…) is, I think, too much fun to ignore on your order sheet. It muffles nothing, is the opposite of docile, and definitely represents the emergence of your darker side (and if you don’t have a darker side, you will if you order this exhaust). But I would argue that more than that, it permits this car to fully express itself, highlighting the fact that the 718 Boxster actually has a different character than the Boxster it replaces. This one is a bit wilder, a bit more raucous, more eagerly responsive to throttle, steering and brakes. But it’s arguably even more sophisticated and poised.
Clearly this is why we were in rural Portugal. The speed limit on these narrow, sometimes single-lane twisting roads is 90 km/h (which is likely two or three-times what it would be in most of Canada). There’s very little traffic and you couldn’t design a better long-distance slalom if you tried. Here the car and its excellent drivetrain shine as you navigate all manner of corners and elevations, paddle-shifting with precision, thrilling to the 718 Boxster’s adhesion to the road. Buyers can order the Porsche Active Suspension Management system ($2,050) that will lower the car an additional 10 or 20 millimetres, but those 9.5 or 10.0-inch rear wheels and the 718 Boxster’s mid-engine balance already contribute to impressively stabilizing the car’s rear end right out of the box.
Our visit to the Ota Military Base enabled us to further explore the car’s balance and adhesion via lane-change and slalom exercises that I think confirmed what we already knew. But flat out acceleration down the runway was something completely different. One doesn’t often get the chance to simply keep the accelerator flat on the floor for two kilometers, so this was unusual.
