Porsche Cayman GTS: is it sexy enough?

How do you make a powerful sportscar look sexy to a generation that prefers the convenience of buses?

Beijing motor show pics - Porsche Cayman GTS

Soon almost no one will want to buy a car. You may think the industry is vibrant and full of exciting things, but cars are enjoying their last hurrah, burning brightly as suns before they fizzle out.

Apart from a few friendless weirdos, today’s young people are simply not interested in cars. When I turned 17, and this is probably true of you too, I became consumed with the need to get on the road as quickly as possible. I wanted a car, not just for the freedom it would afford but for the sheer joy of being able to drive a tonne of machinery at speed.

My son is 19 and has not bothered to take his driving test. His argument: there’s a bus that stops right outside his flat in London and it takes him, in a blizzard of Wi-Fi, to and from Oxford. For £11. If he wants to go somewhere else, he can use a train.

He can move about without worrying about breath tests, speeding fines, parking tickets or no-claim bonuses. My son thinks he’s free because he doesn’t have a car.

And there’s no point going on about the open road and the wind in your hair and the snarl of a straight six because he just doesn’t see cars this way. With good reason. When he was little he spent two hours a day on the school run strapped into a primary-coloured child’s seat, in the back of a Volvo, in an endless jam.

There’s more. When I was a boy we had Grandstand and World of Sport on the television, bringing us all the action from the country’s racetracks. We had rallycross, and we had Minis going wheel to wheel with Ford Cortinas and enormous American muscle cars. And Formula One had no stewards in Pringle jumpers making sure that on the circuit there were no overtaking moves at all.

But look at what we have today. F1 is so boring, television companies have to show replays of a pit stop.

In the olden days there was even a car show on the television. There were Lamborghinis whizzing hither and thither and McLarens at full chat in Italian motorway tunnels. But that’s gone, too, and when it comes back you can be fairly sure it’ll be full of handy eco-hints on how to get mileage from your hybrid.

Then we have car advertising. Where are the burning cornfields and the shots of pretty women hanging their fur coats on parking meters? Gone. And in their stead we have win/free/save international zoom-zoom nonsense full of palindromic numberplates with a bouncy Europop beat. They’re selling cars as though they’re fridges. And if you sell something as a practical proposition, it had better actually be practical. Which, as we’ve established, a car isn’t.

My generation sees the car as an Alfa Romeo drophead on the Amalfi coast with a French playboy at the wheel and Claudia Cardinale in a headscarf as the passenger. Today’s generation sees a Toyota Prius, in a jam, on a wet Tuesday, with a Syrian accountant at the wheel and a broken TomTom on the seat.

The tragedy is there’s nothing — absolutely nothing — out there selling the idea of a car as a dream.

Jaguar, for example, makes a sporty car and then two weeks later brings out a new version that is sportier still. But it is chasing an audience that is getting older and dying. Most people just want a bit of peace and quiet and low fuel consumption. And the new generation doesn’t want a car at all.

There’s a similar problem at Porsche. I tested the Cayman S and thought it was an almost perfect sports car for the 50-something chap whose automotive love affair began long before the thought police arrived. So what does Porsche do? Well, it brings out a new model called the GTS, which is lower and gruntier and more sporty. Hmm. Does Porsche think the world is full of people saying, “Wow. There’s a new Cayman out that is 10mm closer to the ground for better cornering”? Because it isn’t.

Still, that’s its problem. Not mine. Mine is reviewing a car that’s a bit odd because it is not, as you might expect, a follow-up to the 2011 Cayman R. That came with no equipment at all and was designed for track days. The GTS comes with all the usual appurtenances of gracious living. But is actually more powerful and faster than the R was. Odd.

And it gets odder because if you buy a normal Cayman S and fit all the stuff the GTS has as standard the two cars cost as near as dammit the same.

I’d stick with the S because while the GTS is lovely to drive on the sort of deserted road that doesn’t exist any more, really, apart from in Wales (where I was, luckily), you’d need a stopwatch to tell it apart from the S. Both are beautiful to hustle through bends, both go well and both ride nicely apart from on bumpy city-centre streets, where they are both a bit crashy. The GTS especially.

I had only two criticisms of the S. I didn’t like its flappy-paddle box and its seats were deeply uncomfortable. Well, the GTS I tried had a manual, which was sharper, even if it did feel very old-fashioned to be doing so much work, and seats that felt better.

So I don’t see the point of this car. If Porsche wants to give us a lower ride height and slightly higher cornering speeds, it’s got to start reselling the dream of the car. It’s got to forget G-forces and think about the G-spot.

We need more glamour. We need more Italian starlets in headscarfs. We need a new James Dean, because he sold more cars by dying in one than a million engineers will shift in a lifetime.

Porsche Cayman GTS

Engine: 3.5-litre, six cylinders

Outputs: 250kW @ 7400rpm and 380Nm @ 4750rpm

Transmission: Six-speed manual

Acceleration: 0-100km/h: 4.9 sec

Top speed: 285km/h

Average fuel consumption: 10.3 litres per 100km (combined)

Price: $175,893 (£55,397 in Britain)

Release date: On sale now

Rating: 3 out of 5