Porsche Takes Over the New York Times

A morning visit to the New York Times’ Web site showcased ... a massive Porsche ad presence. The car being pushed is the mighty 911, which according to the copy, has “roots in racing, not posing.” Whom could this be an attack on? All those poseurs tooling around in poseur-mobiles from Porsche’s traditional racing rival, Ferrari? Well, who knows, but what I can say is that Porsche’s copywriters could work on their grammatical mojo: Click on the banner ad and you’re taken to a page that declares of Porsche’s flagship sports car: “Whether it’s an extravagance or necessity depends on if you’ve driven it.” How about: “Extravagance? Or necessity? Depends on whether you’ve driven it.” That “whether ... if” maneuver just read badly.

Porsche and its Teutonic brother, BMW, have found themselves in an odd bind lately. Both the car for which "there is no substitute" and the "ultimate driving machine" have made their reputations, deservedly, in performance values. Yet consumers are increasingly looking to own cars that are primarily fuel-efficient transportation appliances or commodious family-haulers. So outright performance design and engineering has become less of a selling point. It hasn’t helped that former Porsche and BMW differentiators, such as crisp handling and tasty power-to-weight ratios, have now been incorporated into many mass-market vehicles.

Clearly, this has compelled Porsche to stress its performance bona fides ever more (although they do like to sneak in references to how fuel-efficient their legendary Boxster engine is). Another factor driving this positioning is that Porsche has introduced new cars over the past decade, such as the Boxster and the Cayman, that have sought to introduce a more budget-conscious poseur consumer to the Porsche brand. This has undercut the performance-purity rep of the 911, and so now Porsche is reminding us that they still build a car, and have for almost 50 years, that can go from freeway to racetrack without skipping a beat.

So is Porsche showing the first signs of an identity crisis? Perhaps. And the timing couldn’t be worse, as after a disastrous takeover attempt of Volkswagen, Porsche is now about to be subsumed into the VW family. There was a time when any car nut would have said the 911 would never, ever fade away. Now it’s becoming a struggle for Porsche to keep their finest car in focus.