2002 Porsche Boxster Roadster Convertible 2-door 2.7l on 2040-cars

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Porsche has doubled US sales to women [w/videos]

Porsche is having a good sales year in the US, with 25,129 vehicles delivered year-to-date coming off the automaker's best July sales ever. That's a 31-percent increase over the same period last year (19,253 deliveries). With year-to-date Panamera sales a surprising 36 percent lower than last year, what possibly could be driving Porsche's sales surge? If you answered Cayman and Boxster sales, you're right. But dealerships are noticing another factor: more women are coming in to buy Porsches, CNBC reports, the bulk of whom picked up new Cayenne SUVs. The German automaker's sales to women in the US have more than doubled in the past two years, increasing from 7 percent to 15 percent. This has helped year-to-date Cayenne sales reach 11,082 - 31 percent higher than the same time last year.
Porsche executives have been trying to tap into the women's market, as evidenced in part by the company's move to pick professional tennis player Maria Sharapova as a brand ambassador. Porsche maintains it has not moved to dramatically change its brand image, but it has shown a number of ads in recent years that uncharacteristically emphasize its vehicles' practicality under the "Engineered for Magic. Everyday" banner - some featuring female drivers.
Be sure to watch CNBC's video report on Porsche's female movement below - you'll also find one of the aforementioned Engineered For Magic ads as well as an interesting case study video on the campaign from ad agency Cramer-Krasselt.

Porsche 918 Spyder to birth stretched 2+2 version?

Porsche is known for its ability to spin off a litter of variants from a single model, and according to a report in Automobile the 918 Spyder (pictured here) might not be spared the house trick. Having taken too many brains and too much money for too much time, company chiefs are said to be examining ways to get more for their development euro out of the supercar, and Plan A is apparently otherwise known as Plan 984. That would be a four-seater, rear-wheel drive supercar that uses a stretched mold of the 918's carbon fiber tub, keeping the V8 in the same mid-mounted place and costing around 350,000 euro.
That would be less than half the MSRP of its inspiration, but the details don't sketch out a car that's just half as good. Automobile speculates it would get something like 700 horsepower in order to best the coming 911 GT2, and about 440 pound-feet of torque. The 984 is quite a ways short of being confirmed; even though a full-size study is said to exist, it's like the 918 would need to become a bigger sales hit for the 984 to happen.
The 984's fortunes don't change those of the 960, the supercoupe Porsche is building to challenge Ferrari. Its potential specs haven't changed since the last report in January, power coming from a 5.0-liter, twin-turbo, eight-cylinder boxer engine with something like 650 hp pushing a curb weight of roughly 3,100 pounds. The means a suspected 0-to-60 mile-per-hour time of 2.5 seconds.

Evo makes the case for the world's best driving road in Majorca

What good is a sports car if you haven't got a great place to drive it? It's a common refrain that we've heard time and time again. But few are as familiar with the problem as they are in the UK, where the number of people, cars on the road and traffic cameras keep growing to conspire against the joy of driving. Leave it to Evo, then, to depart in search of the greatest driving road in the world.
It's a pursuit that's taken the British car mag across Europe, most recently to Romania's Carpathian Mountains where it added the Transalpina Pass to its short list. But its latest journey has taken Evo to the Spanish island of Majorca, where Henry Catchpole found not one, but two spectacular driving roads from behind the wheel of the new Porsche Boxster GTS. We could drone on about the smooth, empty ribbons of twisting tarmac with excellent visibility and panoramic vistas... but you really want to see the video for yourself. Don't miss Evo's previous trip to Romania in the Jaguar F-Type, which we've included below, as well.