[westwest888]

You are correct about total Boxster/Cayman sales through Oct, but if I'm not mistaken, sales numbers for the turbocharged cars have been off roughly 10-20% per month since their introduction. See, e.g., Porsche Reports October 2016 Retail Sales

The new 718 Cayman wasn't really available in October, so they effectively have only 1 model. Could easily translate to Jan/Jan sales up 80%.


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[westwest888]

OK peeps lets cut to the chase - this thread has turned in to a total whinge fest despite the fact there are a lot of positive reviews and awards including 5th place in Autocars - Britains Best Drivers Car 2016.

Most of you have NOT driven the 718S or indeed the 991.2 so you haven't a clue how those engines respond and perform - so why guess and disparage the views of 718 owners who actually bother to give feedback from a position of ownership and knowledge.

Its no wonder 718 owners have just about stopped commenting, too many here have rained on their parade and the enjoyment of their hard earned purchases. Its a shame, its the attitude you see in a number of other forums and in far too many clubs. The end result is always the same, people stop contributing and stop attending.

I was thinking this exactly. I'm driving the 718 and the 991.2S on Saturday at the PEC Los Angeles. Will report back. I expect them both to be awesome. I want to like the 718 better because it is cheaper.


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[westwest888]

257HP isn't a luxury item and they sold a lot of them. An H4 motor by Porsche with a PDK and turbo is a luxury item.


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[westwest888]

Chris Harris drives on empty tracks, runs flat out, and oversteers like a madman even though it kills laptimes by 1 second per corner. For your HPDE with 30+ cars on track and 10 second speed differentials, a turbo 718 is better. Unless no one has turbos, but that is no longer the case with the M4 and others on the field.


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[westwest888]

To me, Porsche is a motorsport team funded by SUVs. And even poseurs like us can put one of their street cars on track and not wreck because the idiot light is controlling the yaw.


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[westwest888]

Think about the base 718 Cayman being faster than recent 911 turbo models, with the mere addition of a Cup2 tire and maybe a little of the magic VW engine remapping. It's an incredibly dangerous thing to put in the hands with anyone who can hold down a $900/month car payment. Kudos to Porsche for making it accessible and borderline safe. Easy to learn, tough to master with PSM off.


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[westwest888]

Lol if you only look at the price and implied profit, not the value and quality.


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[westwest888]

My Boxster is fun to drive but the quality of the standard interior is quite mediocre for a 65k car. The paint is also poor.
Porsche and quality, perhaps yeah although some may dispute that. Porsche and value? is a joke.

Really? I can't think of a more reliable, well built sports car. Ever hear McLaren owners complain about basic things like the headlights don't work and parts fall off? Porsche gets all of these details perfect. Objectively, the quality measures show. No squeaks, no rattles, etc. as in any BMW.


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[westwest888]

When you get "leather" in other cars it's mostly leatherette inserts and some trim on the seat edges. Porsche puts 5 cows into a 2 seater. Again, you're not finding that kind of quality in anything less than a Bentley or some other boutique low vol automaker. The leather pieces in the BMW push on each other and make squeaky noises, especially if you clean them.

Maybe you are more of a Miata guy. You just want something cheap that will run for 500k miles on 85 octane and $19.99 oil changes. The performance with Porsche is just potential unreliability in your mind. You might not be honest with yourself about what new car prices are, and what $40k gets you at a GM dealership (not much).

Coil packs fail all across the industry. It's a unit economics thing. A $180 coil won't fail but a $35 coil could.

I'm going to guess you don't have an iPhone because you have a huge issue with Apple earning $550 on each unit.

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[westwest888]

I am guy. That is the only thing you got right. Don't give me your condescending BS. You know nothing about me. Now go and spin your car on the highway.
Oh, and I forgot to add. I do like Miatas and I can't fit even one cow in my Boxster let alone five.

You're on a Porsche forum saying the highest rated car in the industry is low quality to your untrained eye. Then you go all New England guy on me. We don't have no fancy exotics, blah blah blah, mah truck has better quality and it can tow another truck.

Let me spell this out for you: the 718 is god's chariot. You're paying for a $30k motor and transmission, which has a minimum viable car built around it. Less is more. Even the cheap looking materials are wisely chosen, well fitted, functional, don't glare, etc. If that offends your aesthetic, fill the cabin with $7k of extended leather. I tend not to notice in a drop top sports car.

 

[westwest888]

Hot take from PEC LA: it's pretty damn awesome but I wouldn't sell the 981 to get into one. 718S is not a monster engine like I thought it would be - definitely moves but doesn't kick your stomach or peel your eyelids back. The turbo whistle could be heard in the driver's seat, but not the passenger seat. Startup exhaust sounds great, tooling around in 1st gear is notchy-sounding for sure, at full throttle the sound is good.

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[westwest888]

tl;dr the 991S is every bit as good as a GT3 and I want it. You really can't tell it is a turbo motor. Sounds just like my 2.7L. If you can hear a turbo, it's more of a hushed woosh, where the 718 has a high pitched whistle sound. The 3.0L is totally linear. The sport plus shifts are brutal banging of the gears, just short of upsetting the chassis. The PSM sport mode is enough to let you have fun without letting you wreck. The power is absolutely thundering.

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[westwest888]

There are people who drive SUVs way too fast for their mass and tiny brakes. I usually recommend these people get a Macan. If you're going to roll 85 MPH cruise down California interstates, you should do it in something built for autobahn stopping/safety at speed. It's a really comfortable car to be a passenger in, and it fits even in small garages. I still think they all drive like ice cream trucks.


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[westwest888]

Has anyone actually driven a new Cayenne Turbo? The instructor at PEC told me it was his favorite car they have. It does everything, he exclaimed. Plenty of profit margin in that.

Self driving cars are a marketing stunt in 2017. I think they're 25 years away because we don't have mobile edge artificial intelligence. We don't even have it in data centers because the chips, low level instruction sets, and the software platforms are not developed much less mature. Right now AI is just running on graphics cards for childrens games, as a stop-gap. It's not going to run on Intel x86 microprocessors. Takes decades to build out fabs for this.

Until then, the self driving programs will grow to billions of lines of code as they try to account for every edge case and avoid every accidental death they run into. It's unmaintainable, which is why you need a learning computer to truly self drive. With a local distributed database with the "knowledge".

25 years.




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[westwest888]

WOW. 25 years in computer development is an eternity. Bill Gates once stated that if General Motors had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon. Of course everyone is familiar with Moore's Law which is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. I know that development has slowed considerably, but nevertheless computer development is still mind blowing. For example what used to take 9,000 floppy disks now takes 1 GB of storage space. Nine thousand disks is a lot of desk space. Now all that data can literally fit in the palm of your hand, and all that happened in less than 20 years.

In my view the real programming challenge is to account for the fact that machines will always interact with humans. Even if a dictator could mandate that 100% of all cars would be automated by a specific date, there would still be pedestrians to be concerned with. Machines interacting with other machines is simple when compared with trying to program how a machine will interact with an unpredictable human driving another car, since there will be a prolonged period of time when both manual and automated cars will share the road.

It's not a matter of just releasing another generation of x86 Intel chips like the 4 core proc in your laptop. It's inventing a new family chips better suited to this AI workload. There might be thousands of cores per board, and many boards that talk to each other over a fabric. Nvidia is pushing the state of the art here, but they are mostly adapting gaming cards at present. With new funding and interest from investors in their vision, they can build the "right" solution over the next decade. Then that solution will get fast. Then that solution will get mobile.

Right now a truly AI driven self driving car would need a tractor trailer behind it with IBM Watson on board.


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[westwest888]

AI is already here to allow self driving cars. Do some google...you'd be surprised how well it works. Nvidia is leading in making specialized CPUs and other hardware. They have version 2.0 recently, which is a mini super computer designed to be completely turn key for cars and will likely be installed in many brands in the coming years. Technology is already here to make it happen...its the lazy manufacturers that are too slow to implement or accept it. All they have to do is install the motherboard looking thing that plugs into cameras/ sensors. The rest is software and development is good enough for it to work. Tesla is foremost in implementing, but lots of others are working on it.

FYI, there is little unique between car makers. They all get their hardware from the same providers. For example, youll find Bosche written all over electronic parks in a Porsche or cheapest GM product. Fun fact...same company makes Corvette and Porsche seats.

It's an impressive vision but it's closer to an Atari when we want the workload of Xbox One. There's a 25 year gap in there. There might be petabytes of cognitive data stored in the car when it's mature. We're at gigabytes now.

The gap is putting men on the moon vs. putting a civilization on Mars. We have to be patient. Your next car isn't going to drive you to Florida while you sleep.


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[westwest888]

As an engineer who spent years designing NVIDIA GPUs, and who is currently working on self driving cars, I can confidently say you're way off. We have self driving cars today, and you'll see a lot more of them in the coming years. It may be a long time before everybody has access to one, of course, and there remains room for improvements, but the idea that we need new AI silicon and/or 25 years to really do self driving is incorrect.

Many 718s will share the road with self driving cars. Heck, they already are here in Mountain View...

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Marketing stunts. The moment your camera-plus-cruise-control hack kills a child or a family it will set the movement back. The legal matter of how to move indemnity from the individual owner/driver to the umbrella of Tesla/Uber/Alphabet is not settled. It's basically single payer car insurance at that point.

I'm not saying you can't handle a few highway segments like drive from Las Vegas to Phoenix. I am saying it can't do a NYC, LA, Boston or SF commute door to door fully autonomous for 25 years. Like, Arnold the Terminator needs to be driving.

I find the driving experience to be very nerve racking when the computer is sort of driving in "assisted" mode. It's never clear when I'm supposed to do something and when the car "has it". This applies to the whole crop of Porsche Active Safe and others. There is no common heuristic between manufacturers or even between models of the same manufacturer. For example, mono camera PAS on the 718 is totally different than stereo camera PAS on the Panamera with lane assist.


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[westwest888]

I think you guys are all smoking a pretty wild strain down in Santa Clara. The hubris is staggering. As if you're just one all nighter code bender away from pushing a binary that will:

1/ not make the same mistakes as humans
2/ not make mistakes safe driving humans don't make
3/ won't maim or kill
4/ will follow the ethical profile of the owner
5/ will obey US laws

I've seen every type of self driving prototype tooling around SF with 3 engineers in the car with laptops. I'm still saying 25 years before it can go 5 miles on SF surface streets at 5:00PM with parking lanes as travel lanes and get me home in the same 27 minutes it takes a risk calculating human who can deal with insane ambiguity.

Here are a few snaps. Also saw a ton of the XC90 before they got banned for blowing red lights they couldn't see (but any sober human would know to stop when other cars are stopped).

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[westwest888]

There will be accidents with self driving cars. People will be hurt or killed. The point I would make is there will be a lower accident rate than there is now, and the automated cars will get better with every generation.

There may come a day that human driven cars are not allowed on public roads. That is decades away; there are just too many cars on the road to make that change any time soon. But it would be a sad day.

Great progress has been made with prosthetics. A robo middle finger is just a few years away, if only we would shift resources to this important aspect of self driving cars.

The problem is in year 0 to year 10, self driving cars add to the number of accidents. 33,000 accidents become 33,001 accidents as bugs are found and preventable mistakes are made if the driver was just driving. At the same time, driver assist systems do not get credit for the saves because they aren't quantifiable. There are no points for near misses. You could save someone every day for 2500 days and if your program gets him in a fatal accident on the 2501th day it was all for nothing.

The heartless libertarian attitude of "well this will eventually be safer" is not how our legal system is set up. Kill a beautiful child and her picture will be on cable news every day for 90 days while everyone demands answers.

The arrogance of silicon valley is that some people will be "too stupid" and "should have known better" when their self driver plows into something at full speed where anyone except a heart attack victim would stop. Everyone thinks our incremental progress means they can occasionally defer control and tune out for a minute. Now is the point of maximum risk, where a misinformed public thinks they bought magic for a $2500 option.

As I've documented here in the past, systems like PAS do not follow normal human driver behavior and cause others to react to the car's inattentiveness (with road rage).


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[westwest888]

Driver assistance functions prevent accidents and transitively save lives. Companies like Volvo use technologies such as this to pursue Vision Zero, where zero people die in a Volvo. This a truly worthy goal and vision.

Companies like Tesla used a "convenience feature" to kill and decapitate an enthusaist early adopting customer. That guy would be alive if he just f-ing drove. This is an insane use of the technology.

Retreating to "well over a long horizon we could save lives on the net" is not defensible. You're one life behind already. Deliver 500,000 of those cars for $40k and you're going to find out that idiots are very clever, and find bugs engineers with a 130 IQ never thought of (or had time to rushing to be first to market).




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