Classified adverts are full of descriptions of cars that are claimed to be immaculate and are nothing of the sort. But this Boxster is a rare example of a car that really does look like it has rolled straight out of Porsche’s factory, despite that event happening 20 years ago.
A 3.2-litre Boxster S, rather than the more common 2.7-liter base Boxster, this example has covered just 5326 miles, has just one recorded keep on the registration document, and is currently up for sale through the Collecting Cars auction site. The service history shows a couple of services stamps from the early days, then nothing, as if the car had vanished from the face of the earth. Which, in effect, it had, because it had been put into storage and wouldn’t emerge until 2020 when it underwent a careful re-commissioning process.
Such an extremely low mileage makes it difficult to value, so it will be fascinating to see where the bids have reached when the hammer falls on Friday, July 2. But with two days left to run at the time of writing, they’d only hit £13,500, and whatever it does eventually change hands for won’t be anywhere near the £47,090 you need to spend to get into a brand new 718 Boxster.
That new Boxster is powered by a turbocharged four-cylinder engine, but many enthusiasts will tell you that the earlier 3.2-litre naturally aspirated flat-six in older Boxster like this one is actually a much more charismatic engine, even if it doesn’t deliver quite the same kick in the back. You can still order a new naturally aspirated engine in a new Boxster, but that means paying a serious £67,250 for the 4.0-litre Boxster S.
This older car’s 3.2 motor is mated to the standard six-speed manual gearbox (2.7 Boxsters made do with a five-speeder), and its 247bhp was sufficient to propel it to 62mph in a claimed 5.6sec when it was new. And, given the low mileage, there’s no reason why it couldn’t still pull those numbers today.
Being an older car, it misses out on some of the refinements we expect from modern sports cars. The rear window is plastic, for instance, because this car was built a year before Porsche switched to glass. And there’s no fancy navigation system or Apple CarPlay. But if you can live with that, this could be an incredible opportunity to experience how an almost new Boxster would have looked, driven and even smelled back in 2001 for the price of a very ordinary new car today.
Keyword: This 20-year old 5000-mile Boxster is a ‘new’ Porsche for Peugeot money