Sitting at home on a quiet evening there are many things I could be doing on the Internet, but one of the best places to spend an hour is on Porsche.com/usa and playing with the “car configurator” tool.
Porsche is like BMW, the windscreen and three pedals is standard, everything else is an option (unless you want the carbon pedals that is). For example, a Cayman starts at a very reasonable $51,900. Want metallic paint – $710 (dark blue, looked hot), Carrera S wheels $2785 (I passed, they are not that much nicer), Sports seats with Leather interior is $5375 (and how could I not?) and so on.
By the time I was done my “it’s a lot of car for the money” $51,900 car was a touch over $83,000. Over $30K in options…
And I left plenty of options unselected. Getting the seatbacks painted in the exterior colour was $1580. The $340 for getting the seatbelts in yellow at first seemed a little excessive, but suddenly looked downright reasonable when compared to the $1990 to have the air vents painted.
Among the options I did select the $2340 Bose sound system and six-disk CD auto-changer, the $1560 Xenon lights and of course getting the Porsche logo embroidered on the headrests ($285).
In the world of the Internet car configurators anything goes. Want A 911 Carrera 4 in “Amethyst Metallic” (looks like purple to me, and rather stunningly is a $3140 option, yes that’s over 3 grand for purple paint) with a Carrera Red leather seats ($1510) with blue seatbelts ($340) and blue leather interior (well over $12K for everything) then go for it.
I do hope any remotely professional salesman would stop someone buying the purple/red with blue interior, even if its out of self preservation, one day he may well have to try to sell it as a used car.
