gasman11

Hi all,

I've never driven or owned a Porsche before but I've very interested in the Porsche 718 Cayman. Any advice for first time purchase? How much discount off MSRP is ideal, if possible?

Thanks!

cerbomark

Take your time, there a lots of options, and model s etc... Consider a low mileage CPO car too.

TahouHots

Hi. I just went through this exact process early this year. Some thoughts for you:

If 718 is your choice (and it's a great one) you have two basic choices, Base or S trim. Get the S -- 350 HP. It's more expensive, but the performance is vastly better. As you move up to the GTS and GT4, you head more into track car territory, with a commensurate cost premium.

CPO or new? I bought CPO and got what I felt was a good deal. 2017 718 S with 15k miles and 3.5 years total warranty remaining with CPO for 57,500. I had to get it shipped clear across the country of course, but them's the breaks.

If you cannot see it yourself, get a PPI done. You can find a local P shop in the town where the car is, or dial up Lemonsquad or similar. I used Lemonsquad because I could not get anyone to visit the dealer due to Covid (this was in March). Things are probably better now. That said, lemonsquad did a decent job and the car arrived exactly as their inspection said it would. I had a chance to speak to a P car specialist as well. His opinion was with the newer porche's you only really need to worry about body damage. the engine and drive train are almost never an issue.

Buy the features you want. No sense in getting a great car that lacks that one thing you really wish it had (whatever that is). You'll hear all sorts of opinions about Sport Chrono or PASM, etc. Nice features, really not useful for even vigorous daily driving. My car doesn't have either and let me tell you it kicks royal rear end.

As for discount, my experience in negotiating about 10+ cars is that there is very little room to negotiate below maybe 2k down -- and even that is rare. I was lucky in that for the car I did buy the dealer was more or less closed except for online and they wanted to move the car and agreed to a 2500 discount. I feel like I got essentially a new car for a great price.

I figured out where to start negotiating by creating a spreadsheet and plugged in all of the cars I felt I would want, averaged those prices to get a point of reference, and then compared those to prices on Cargrus, Edmunds, NADA, etc. I had hard data when I went to negotiate and had a solid sense of whether or not a car was overpriced or fairly priced and went at each dealer with offers based on that data -- I happily shared my data and sent them links to cars that most closely matched what they had. Some dealers balked. Others were actually quite willing to deal -- in one case I had a car in TX that I knew was overpriced come down by 4500. But it lacked a few things I wanted. In all cases, you will not get away with a steal unless you buy a base model, or one with a serious problem in the title. You'll end up paying a premium because it's a porsche, either in shipping, fees, taxes, features, or all. I figured my total price after all taxes and fess and shipping was btw 65-66.

This is just off the top of my head. Happy to answer questions and get into a dialogue. Here's the car I bought, sitting cozy in my driveway.

worf928

Don’t buy new.

Unlike all other mass-market car marques, when buying new, Porsche is all about the hundreds of options available from seat types and performance options to which bits are covered in leather. If you know nothing of this, then buy used in whatever color you want. You won’t be any less happy, you’ll save the 10s-of-thousands of depreciation dollars in the first 2 years of ownership, and you’ll spend that time determining more precisely what you want your next Porsche to be.

IMO, there are two reasons to buy a new Porsche:
- you know *exactly* which of the hundreds of options you really want
- you are going to do European delivery and pick it up at the factory.
- (*)

European delivery for the next year is only for bold gamblers (as in, it might be canceled by PAG as you board your plane) with contiguous weeks of free time available for quarantine on both legs of travel. So, that’s out.

Having never driven or even sat in a Porsche you don’t know $h1+ about $h1+ as far seats, how it rides, and the rest. You don’t even know if you’ll fit or if you like the way it goes over the road. Not knowing what you’ve owned and liked previously, I’d say that there’s a greater than 50% chance that you will hate it. The suspension will be too harsh, the seats too hard, the steering too heavy and with too much road feel, the clutch too tiring, the cabin too noisy, and the “technology” so last century that you are embarrassed to allow your friends to sit in it.

Test drive several. Buy CPO. Drive for a year or three, then, once you know a lot more, order new.

The third (*) reason to order new, valid only for the next 12-24-ish months (a guess that) is if you cannot stand poorly-designed and poorly-executed touch-screen dominated “glass cockpits.” And if that’s the case, then the 718 is it, as far as Porsche is concerned. On the other hand, you still don’t know $h1+ about $h1 so you’d better go test drive as many different types as you can as soon as you can.

PDK? Or Manual?
How much horsepower do you have to have in order to not feel inadequate?
2-way Sport Seats?
Or 2-way Sport Seats Plus?
Or 14-way power seats?
Of 18-way adaptive Sport Seats Plus?

Those are the most important decisions you face. After that you can consider your need for a limited-slip differential, what wheel diameters matter, leather, infotainment etc.

AlexCeres

What worf said. Also, it’s be good to test drive NA vs turbo if you can manage that. Some folks really prefer the low end torque of the turbos, and some the linear high rev’ing 6 cylinder. If money is no object, I’d consider the gts 4.0 as a starting point. Otherwise the Cayman S. After a test drive, salt to taste.