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Fresh off last week’s red car, I bumped into another car that just happened to be a much different shade of red. This 2015 Porsche 911 GT3 is finished in paint-to-sample Arena Red, which technically is a custom color on the 991 GT3, but this isn’t this first time we’ve seen it on a 911. Arena Red was the launch color of the 993 Turbo and featured on the ironic Kills Bugs Fast poster that we all probably had a chuckle over when remembering it. It isn’t a historic color like some of the other paint-to-sample options we’ve seen, but actually more modern as it launched in 1995 on the already mentioned 993, as well as the Boxster and very early 996 cars. Does it fit well on the 991 GT3?
For the past 15 years or so, Mercedes-Benz and AMG would take their flagship sedan, put a twin-turbo V12 in it that makes enough power to pull a barge of coal, and sell it for over $200,000. Then before the dealership owner’s nephew gets a chance to scratch the paint up by “washing” it, it isn’t worth $200,000 anymore. Mile after mile, the car is worth less. Significantly less. Like, “I could have gone to Harvard” less. Until we are here today, some five years later, where the car has lost over $160,000 in depreciation. Still the same car, same 621 horsepower and 738 lb-ft of torque, and of course, same running costs. Tempting?
After last week’s Porsche 911 Targa 4 GTS loaded up with a seemingly endless amount of options, I wanted to look at another GTS in the Porsche lineup, the Cayman. Porsche introducted the Cayman GTS in 2014 with much fanfare, as this was once again a setup with the S model but not as hardcore as the yet to be released GT4. It boasted respectable numbers from the 3.6L flat-six, and would accelerate to 60 mph in 4.9 seconds with the manual transmission, 4.7 seconds with PDK, and 4.5 seconds with PDK and Sport Plus mode. Base price was around $75,000, but of course you could never find one for that price given how many options were stuffed into these. This 2015 up for sale in New York is a great example of it.
A few months ago I looked at a 2014 Audi SQ5 that is purely an answer to the SUV boom that doesn’t seem to be stopping. Porsche wasn’t blind to this fact, and doubled down on the highly successful Cayenne and launched the slightly smaller Q5-based Macan. Never to be short on choices, you could chose between the standard Macan, S, GTS, and Turbo. Naturally, these sold like crazy. Give people their SUV fix in a premium package and you can basically print money. However, building a lot of something means there are a ton of them on the market at any given time, and add in the always steady German depreciation, and you suddenly have a very nice package for new Honda CR-V money. This is exactly what we have today with this 2015 Macan S up for sale at a Porsche of Austin, Texas. These slightly-used SUVs just get more and more appealing to me every day.
Often we ignore really modern cars on these pages. It’s not necessarily that they’re not exciting – often it’s quite the opposite. For me, it’s just that they’re not exciting to see for sale because they’re still effectively cars that you can walk into a dealership and buy. And I’m sorry, while they can thoroughly out-perform older cars in virtually every way, you can’t just walk into an Audi dealer and buy a brand new Quattro, can you!
But impressive these cars are, and if you can look into the future in having one as a potential special car to see in the future, you can balance a hefty discount from new with near-new status and have quite a savings over stock, too. Two encounters with modern BMWs recently have my eyes trained on the pair you see here; the M4 and the M2. For around the same discount sticker price, which is the one to get?
