Porsche 718: End of an era for the Boxster and Cayman

Talk about going out at the top. The finest coupe and convertible in their respective classes are no more, despite 2024 being their biggest selling year in Australia. The Porsche 718 series, encompassing both the Cayman and the Boxster, is going out of production, largely due to an almost unfathomable botch concerning its electric successor.

Porsche is far from alone in finding this electric transition hard to manage. Whether it’s governments constantly shifting legislative goalposts, Chinese rivals moving the tech game forward at pace or Porsche’s battery supplier for the 718 project going bankrupt, life hasn’t been easy in the halls of Zuffenhausen of late.

Tentatively positive results for the electric Macan in the US have stopped a boardroom bloodbath, but other markets, most notably China, have been slow to warm to what has traditionally been Porsche’s volume-selling SUV. The 718 line was due to follow on the heels of the Macan, but now the launch date has been pushed back to – at the most informed estimates – 2027.

It’s been a slow and protracted death for internal-combustion versions of the 718. Like the ICE-engined Macan, it was cancelled in Europe not due to emissions but off the back of arcane cybersecurity regulations. These rules applied to the mainstream range but due to their limited production run, not the 718 Boxster RS Spyder and 718 Cayman GT4 RS specials. Run-out 718 stock has provoked a bit of a feeding frenzy in EU countries with buyers keen to register cars before July 1, after which unsold cars became unregisterable.

Demand for the 718 has held firm in many other key markets, despite this model line being nine years old, but the very last units are scheduled to be built in October. There will then be a considerable hiatus before we get our hands on the electric 718, Porsche’s CEO Oliver Blume telling the Annual General Meeting last May that these cars would arrive in the “medium term”.

The nightmare scenario has come to pass. An already cash-strapped Porsche will be without its budget sports car range for what could be two years.

The 718 has not been without its travails. Introduced at the 2016 Geneva Show, the initial line up consisted purely of four-cylinder turbocharged models which found new buyers for Porsche but didn’t endear themselves to the notoriously conservative Porsche faithful.

The company made amends by reintroducing the flat-six engine to the line up in 2019 with the Cayman GT4 and Boxster Spyder, introducing a 4.0-litre normally-aspirated version of the Porsche 911’s 9A2EVO engine. Good for 309kW in this guise, it was subsequently slotted into the 4.0 GTS models, albeit in
detuned 294kW guise.

The ultimate incarnations of the 718 were the 370kW Cayman GT4 RS and Boxster Spyder RS models, which challenged the rigidly maintained Porsche hierarchy that had traditionally protected the 911. These were the gloves-off 718 models we’d all hoped for but never thought we’d see and the results were explosive. As it stands, it looks like we’ll never see their likes again. We’ll have faster, we’ll have smarter but don’t count on anything more exciting. For the foreseeable future at least.

This article originally appeared in the Driven to Extinction section of the June 2025 issue of Wheels magazine. To subscribe, click here.