Porsche 718 Boxster
Why 8.3: Same mid-engine chassis as the Cayman, same honest money, one fewer panel over your head. Driven slightly less than the coupe because weather gets a vote, and speculated on not at all.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
Roof down you hear more of the flat-four's boxer offbeat, and the optional sports exhaust does what it can with it. But it is the same coarse, resonant turbo four as the Cayman, and open-air listening mostly clarifies how thin it is against the flat-six it displaced.
4-cylinder · turbocharged · 7,500 rpm redline · rated 4.4 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €61k (2016) → €46k (2026), trending down · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
There aren't any — strict two-seater, and the roof folds into where they would go.
The same 982 child-seat preparation option as the Cayman: an ISOFIX bracket plus the key switch that disables the passenger airbag. Ordering it is the only way a child seat goes in this car at all.
Porsche 718/982 child-seat preparation option (Tequipment documentation) — shared platform provision with the 718 Cayman
The long version
Porsche has spent thirty years being careful not to let the Boxster embarrass the 911, and the 982 is where that stopped mattering: the chassis is the same one the Cayman gets praised for, 45/55 over the axles, and the roof comes off in twelve seconds. Buyers treat it accordingly — this is a car people put miles on rather than store, and the resale curve is an ordinary depreciation slope rather than the speculative spike a limited-run Porsche attracts. The four-cylinder turbo is the part nobody defends, which is why the GTS 4.0 exists and why the manual matters more here than on almost any other current car: with the flat-four doing little for the ears, the gearbox is what keeps you busy. Take the roof off on a mountain road and the engine note stops being the point anyway.