By David Van Epps · January 21, 2026

Well we’ve had our first family squabble!  My head almost exploded reading my co-host Tim Harris’ FTT newsletter article today. And while my days are largely consumed from dawn to dusk keeping 50+ projects in the air here at Sonderwerks, this day would not pass without my counter-point to Tim’s. 

For those of us of a certain age, I could only imagine starting our next podcast with “Tim, you ignorant Slut!” 

The premise sounds compelling, but it rests on a false equivalence: that selling options and personalization somehow replaces engineering philosophy. At Porsche, those two things coexist—and always have. There are NO posers at Porsche!

Porsche didn’t become a brand obsessed with spec sheets. It has always been a brand that let customers tailor cars precisely because the underlying platform was so fundamentally right. Porsche has had the Sonderwunsch Program long before cheap tech let anyone with a Cricut livery up their pocket rockets with vinyl.

Paint-to-sample, seat choices, gear ratios, wheel widths—these weren’t signs of philosophical drift in the air-cooled era. They were evidence of confidence. You customize when the core doesn’t need explaining.

The idea that Instagram posers’ posts about stitching color signal cultural decay confuses noise with signal. Enthusiasts argue about details because the cars still deliver. No one debates wheel finishes on cars that don’t matter.

If Porsche were truly “losing on philosophy,” the GT cars wouldn’t exist in their current form at all. A GT3 that revs to 9,000 rpm, a manual-only GT3 Touring, a Cayman GT4 RS with induction noise as a design feature—these are not the choices of a brand that’s forgotten feel. They are expensive, yes—but they are still philosophically uncompromised.

The Ferrari comparison also breaks down under scrutiny. Ferrari monetized personalization instead of product breadth. Porsche uses personalization to fund product depth.

Porsche is one of the only manufacturers simultaneously building:

Naturally aspirated, high-revving engines

Manual transmissions

Rear-engine cars with meaningful evolution

Purpose-built track cars that sacrifice comfort and margin

Those programs survive precisely because Porsche is profitable (or at least has been) elsewhere. A Cayman GT4 RS does not exist because Porsche chased margins—it exists because Porsche could afford to build something irrational.

Risk didn’t vanish. It moved upward in the lineup, where the business case still works.  Macan and Cayenne owners fund the bulk of this innovation, and we should be eternally grateful for that.

The ladder metaphor assumes Porsche’s role is to be someone’s first enthusiast car. Historically, that was never really true.

Most people didn’t start with 356s or early 911s either. They arrived after:

Crappy British roadsters

Hot hatchbacks from Germany and Japan

Other used sports cars

What’s different today isn’t Porsche’s pricing, which has never been a bargain. It’s the global cost of cars, safety regulation, and emissions compliance. An $80K entry point isn’t a Porsche decision in isolation; it’s the reality of building a low-volume sports car in 2026.

More importantly: Porsche doesn’t lose future customers just because they don’t buy new at 25. Porsche has always relied on used cars, hand-me-downs, and aspirational pull.

A 30-year-old buying a GR86 today is far more likely to want a used Cayman or 911 later than a new one—and Porsche’s used ecosystem is stronger than almost any brand on earth. That ladder still exists. It just runs through the secondary market first.

Mazda and Toyota Aren’t Counterexamples—They’re Complements

Mazda can double down on the Miata’s purity because it sells millions of CX-5s. Toyota can revive the MR2 because the Corolla pays the bills. Porsche does not have that luxury at scale.

Every “simple, analog Porsche” would still need to meet the same regulations, at Porsche’s smaller volumes, with Porsche labor costs. And even then—Porsche already makes the cars everyone is praising in theory:

The Caymans and Boxsters remain benchmarks for steering and balance

The GT cars still define driver engagement

Manuals still exist where competitors abandoned them

The difference is that Porsche refuses to pretend these things are cheap to do.

Young Enthusiasts Aren’t Rejecting Porsche—They’re Learning Toward It

Younger buyers choosing GR86s, Civic Type Rs, and used performance cars isn’t a vote against Porsche. It’s the same apprenticeship cycle that has always existed.

They’re learning suspension geometry now.
They’re learning balance now.
They’re learning what matters now.

That’s exactly how Porsche creates future loyalty—not by racing to the bottom with an artificially cheap “entry Porsche,” but by remaining the reference point everyone else measures against.

If Porsche diluted that identity to chase volume, that would break the bond.

The real risk isn’t that Porsche becomes Ferrari, (Thank God!)

It’s that people mistake restraint for retreat.

Porsche doesn’t need to “remember why people cared.”

It never stopped acting on it.

What it needs to do—and largely is doing—is survive an era of regulation, electrification, and global scale without abandoning the core principles that made it matter in the first place.

That’s not selling out.

That’s playing the long game.

And the fact that everyone—from Mazda to Toyota to Honda—keeps trying to “build a car that feels like a Porsche” suggests the philosophy isn’t lost at all.

It’s still the standard. 

— David Van Epps

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