Crocodile tears

If you go on the Porsche website and look for a 718 Cayman or Boxster you’ll see their pretty pictures are now accompanied by two words: ‘Limited Availability.’ Actually try to configure one and you get a whole sentence revealing the unwelcome truth: ‘Note: It is no longer possible to place new factory orders for this model.’ Which is because earlier this week, production ceased for good. For 20 years the Cayman has been part of our automotive furniture (the Boxster for damn near 30), and now it has gone, at least in the form we have come to know and love.

There will be another next year, but like Dr Who regenerating, it will be an entirely different character, unrelated to that which went before. Or so we have been told over and over again: the next Boxster and Cayman will be EV only. Of course that view has been (quite sensibly) modified of late to allow for the prospect of ‘top models’ retaining some kind of petrol power, but which those will be and what form they will take we do not as yet know.

The 982 Cayman has done well, at least over here – it was withdrawn from sale in Europe over security issues some time ago – and is now in its tenth year of production, and in certain regards it feels every second of it. The tiny low-res infotainment screen and associated buttons seem older even than they are, I’m told it has wired-in CarPlay but I couldn’t make it work and the dials are these strange things with physical needles that describe real arcs as they move around their no less real gauges. Imagine that.