2007 Porsche Boxster Test Drive

Still the Gold Standard

The newest Boxster S gets the 295-hp Cayman S engine for $3,400 less -- plus the bonus of a drop-top. What's not to like?

There are less-expensive two-seat roadsters and more-powerful ones, as well as more-prestigious examples in this relatively exclusive convertible market segment, but no manufacturer has trumped the Porsche Boxster’s combination of artful balance, superb brakes, sharp steering and remarkable daily-driver utility since its introduction in 1996 as a spare, simple fun car.

Porsches have never been cheap, however, and the Boxster S, even though it’s almost identical to the base Boxster model, except for its more powerful engine, is no exception. With minimal options, a Boxster S goes out the dealer’s door for well over $60,000 — roughly the base price of a faster and more powerful Corvette Z06 — and can easily exceed $80,000 when loaded with options.

A Boxster S can be equipped virtually to full Porsche 911 standards, with optional all-leather interior, Xenon headlamps, PASM active suspension management, Sport-Chrono electronically adjustable driver systems, navigation and communications package and the ceramic brakes that debuted on the $445,000 Porsche Carrera GT.

At that point, the Boxster S isn’t just a spare, simple fun car.

Exterior

A large part of the Boxster’s appeal is its timeless styling, neither retro nor faddish — both of which tend to grow old fast. The Boxster S takes its clean, unique and distinctive shape from the mid-1950s Porsche 550 Spyder, a tiny race car widely recognized as “the James Dean car.”

Like the then-precedent-setting 550 Spyder, the Boxster S is mid-engined, its flat six-cylinder powerplant mounted ahead of the rear wheels and directly behind the bulkhead aft of the cockpit. Unlike that of any other production car, the Boxster S engine is totally hidden from view, accessible only to Porsche technicians and committed do-it-yourselfers.

To its credit, Porsche did virtually nothing to change the shape and style of the Boxster’s body when the model was 80 percent reengineered in 2005, and though the ’07 Boxster S has a new, more-powerful engine, there’s no boastful badging or trim to announce that fact.

How can you tell an ’07 Boxster S from an ’06? You can’t, unless it has the expensive, newly optional 19-inch wheels (which, to my eye, give it the toy-like look of a pedal-car.)

Interior

The first-generation Boxster S had a clean, simple, rounded, organic instrument panel and dashboard, while the new version has a busier, more angular console and dash. Though the cockpit can optionally be clad in leather, there’s a heavily plasticized look to the standard S that is exaggerated by the fact that some of the plastic panels are silver, an unfortunate hue for this material that brings to mind the word “tacky.”

Another S option is a body-color plastic console between the seats that resembles a piece of Crayola-colored Tupperware tooling, exaggerated by the matching body-colored roll-hoop trim and seatbelts that are also part of the package. The look is … well, interesting but definitely not subtle.

The standard Boxster S seats easily adjust manually fore and aft and vertically, with an electric backrest-angle control. But if you want power-everything, options include 12-way motorized seats as well as “adaptive sport seats” that allow tailoring of the cornering support offered by the inflatable side bolsters.

Cockpit room is ample; with no front-mounted engine and transmission to intrude, the foot wells are particularly spacious.

It’s often assumed that roadsters have no luggage room — a deficit especially true today, when everybody from Mazda to Mercedes is fitting their two-seaters with space-hungry, jack-knifing metal tops. The Boxster S, however, retains a splendid, weather-tight power soft-top (12 seconds down or up, the fastest in the industry, and it can be activated at up to 30 mph) that consumes absolutely no trunk space when retracted.

Better yet, because of its engine-in-the-middle configuration, the Boxster S has two trunks — one fore and one aft. And for ’07, the rear-compartment volume grew slightly thanks to relocation of the coolant header tank.