Alpine A110 to be axed?

[craigjm]

Why are we not picking over a few grand on a 50k plus car. The only people that care are those trying to defend the existence of one over the other.

Most buyers will already have a preference or try both so the slanging match it’s rather moot

[blueg33]

craigjm said:

Why are we not picking over a few grand on a 50k plus car. The only people that care are those trying to defend the existence of one over the other.

Most buyers will already have a preference or try both so the slanging match it’s rather moot

I agree. I think its a response to many comments saying the A110 is too expensive. Its actually about the same price as the competition

[Prestonese]

maz8062 said:

Prestonese said:

Lexington59 said:

You don’t need to add anything to a new 718 nowadays. Adding buckets to get the comparison reminds me of BCR’s tomfoolery with the sales and production numbers.

Fact remains you can get a manual base Cayman for a headline price less than the cheapest Alpine. Like for like is almost irrelevant as this is the one number buyers will be looking at. The 718 specs are much higher than the old 981s where you absolutely needed to add basics like Bluetooth and better sound, you even get Nav as standard with a digital radio which is surprising for Porsche.

Cayman: £44,790
Alpine Pure: £46,900 (although it seemed I could only configure a Pure from £48140 this morning!)

So you’re going up against the established brand from a higher initial price point.

Three obvious flaws there.

Firstly, barely anyone ever specs the Cayman with no options regardless of whether they are a genuine enthusiast or not and regardless whether the standard equipment have improved. Secondly, 80% of buyers will add PDK, fancy paint, climate control and rear parking sensors at a bare minimum. You know, resale value etc etc.

Finally, the prices you quote for the Alpine includes the first year car tax. Porsche for some reason don't include this. It's about £1300 for the first year for a base Cayman. Damn Alpine for being so honest.

I'm sure you know this but you choose to be obtuse time and time again. And time and time again we will just call you out.

I think the point is that they're both in the same ballpark figure - a couple of grand either way in cars costing just shy of £50k doesn't make that much difference. Throw in the Boxster as another option and things start to get even more difficult for the Alpine.

That's the point. To say it's very or too expensive you have to put it in context. There are too many lazy comments on here about prices when they are pretty much the same.

My experience of speaking to sports car buyers is they tend to go for one or the other so someone considering a Boxster won't usually be considering the Alpine. Porsche effectively caters for both markets which is the reason for the shared platform but there shouldn't be a huge overlap between the Alpine and Boxster.

[Prestonese]

Lexington59 said:

Prestonese said:

Lexington59 said:

You don’t need to add anything to a new 718 nowadays. Adding buckets to get the comparison reminds me of BCR’s tomfoolery with the sales and production numbers.

Fact remains you can get a manual base Cayman for a headline price less than the cheapest Alpine. Like for like is almost irrelevant as this is the one number buyers will be looking at. The 718 specs are much higher than the old 981s where you absolutely needed to add basics like Bluetooth and better sound, you even get Nav as standard with a digital radio which is surprising for Porsche.

Cayman: £44,790
Alpine Pure: £46,900 (although it seemed I could only configure a Pure from £48140 this morning!)

So you’re going up against the established brand from a higher initial price point.

Three obvious flaws there.

Firstly, barely anyone ever specs the Cayman with no options regardless of whether they are a genuine enthusiast or not and regardless whether the standard equipment have improved. Secondly, 80% of buyers will add PDK, fancy paint, climate control and rear parking sensors at a bare minimum. You know, resale value etc etc.

Finally, the prices you quote for the Alpine includes the first year car tax. Porsche for some reason don't include this. It's about £1300 for the first year for a base Cayman. Damn Alpine for being so honest.

I'm sure you know this but you choose to be obtuse time and time again. And time and time again we will just call you out.

I see the £48,140 is the OTR price for the Alpine, a comparable figure for the manual Porsche including the road tax is £46,150.

https://www.nextgreencar.com/new-car-search/

Point on options (your #1 and #2) is that you don't actually need to add anything to the base 718 Cayman unlike the older 981 as it's actually a fairly reasonable standard spec with nav, etc.
That said I'm sure some people do add plenty of options, but there are also some pretty low "poverty" spec ones out there in the used network.

Fairly reasonable but not adequate. Almost all will spec back the items I mentioned which will pretty much bring the car level on pricing. There are indeed a few poverty spec cars but they hang around in the second hand markets and priced accordingly.

[Miserablegit]

blueg33 said:

Going from Porsche's own specs, not sure many Cayman buyers even know about fastest laps, but on those figures I agree.

Boggo Cayman with bucket seats, pdk and cruise is £1000 more than the Alpine

Indeed, those figures do not agree with Porsche’s own figures either.
One can bet the car has £20k of extras including pdk, sport chrono, PCCB PASM etc as is always the way with Porsche test cars.

Carry on making things up Lexington...

[Prestonese]

blueg33 said:

craigjm said:

Why are we not picking over a few grand on a 50k plus car. The only people that care are those trying to defend the existence of one over the other.

Most buyers will already have a preference or try both so the slanging match it’s rather moot

I agree. I think its a response to many comments saying the A110 is too expensive. Its actually about the same price as the competition

I think most understand that but Porsche play this game too by providing heavily optioned cars to the press and using the base prices as the headline. There was a ridiculous test when the initial PE versions came out when Porsche sent a press car in S spec with 20k+ of options added. You might as well say a house in Mayfair cost only the price of the smallest studio flat you can buy in the area - after all, nobody needs more than a bed to sleep in but it is misleading.

[Lexington59]

Miserablegit said:

blueg33 said:

Going from Porsche's own specs, not sure many Cayman buyers even know about fastest laps, but on those figures I agree.

Boggo Cayman with bucket seats, pdk and cruise is £1000 more than the Alpine

Indeed, those figures do not agree with Porsche’s own figures either.
One can bet the car has £20k of extras including pdk, sport chrono, PCCB PASM etc as is always the way with Porsche test cars.

Carry on making things up Lexington...

Making things up ? Porsche's figures are always conservative. Fastest laps indexes a lot of data from various tests. 0-60 is a case in point, Porsche quote 4.9 for the base PDK yet Car & Driver clocked it at 3.9.

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15098075/201...

I think the facts speak for themselves, I'll leave the spin to BCR..

[Lexington59]

Prestonese said:

I think most understand that but Porsche play this game too by providing heavily optioned cars to the press and using the base prices as the headline. There was a ridiculous test when the initial PE versions came out when Porsche sent a press car in S spec with 20k+ of options added. You might as well say a house in Mayfair cost only the price of the smallest studio flat you can buy in the area - after all, nobody needs more than a bed to sleep in but it is misleading.

That's just good marketing. But the fact remains the cheapest Alpine is still more expensive than the cheapest Porsche.

[blueg33]

Top gear compared the Cayman S with the A110 for acceleration

They were very close and the S is £10k more than the A110

Alpine A110 Porsche Cayman S

0-10 0.85 0.80
0-20 1.46 1.40
0-30 2.07 2.01
0-40 2.82 2.70
0-50 3.60 3.70
0-60 4.62 4.58
0-70 5.71 5.60
0-80 7.07 7.10
0-90 8.57 8.40
0-100 10.32 9.98
0-110 12.62 12.10
0-120 15.45 14.20

[Prestonese]

Lexington59 said:

Miserablegit said:

blueg33 said:

Going from Porsche's own specs, not sure many Cayman buyers even know about fastest laps, but on those figures I agree.

Boggo Cayman with bucket seats, pdk and cruise is £1000 more than the Alpine

Indeed, those figures do not agree with Porsche’s own figures either.
One can bet the car has £20k of extras including pdk, sport chrono, PCCB PASM etc as is always the way with Porsche test cars.

Carry on making things up Lexington...

Making things up ? Porsche's figures are always conservative. Fastest laps indexes a lot of data from various tests. 0-60 is a case in point, Porsche quote 4.9 for the base PDK yet Car & Driver clocked it at 3.9.

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15098075/201...

I think the facts speak for themselves, I'll leave the spin to BCR..

Car and Driver tests to 60 and they also don't have two up like the Autocar test. I also recall there's some US tests which do so using a rolling start. I tested the Alpine without a passenger and got a 0-62 in 4.1 seconds. In any case, it's mostly an irrelevant discussion for me.

[Prestonese]

Lexington59 said:

Prestonese said:

I think most understand that but Porsche play this game too by providing heavily optioned cars to the press and using the base prices as the headline. There was a ridiculous test when the initial PE versions came out when Porsche sent a press car in S spec with 20k+ of options added. You might as well say a house in Mayfair cost only the price of the smallest studio flat you can buy in the area - after all, nobody needs more than a bed to sleep in but it is misleading.

That's just good marketing. But the fact remains the cheapest Alpine is still more expensive than the cheapest Porsche.

Pity the fool who falls for these tricks.

[rick.e]

Lexington59 said:

That's just good marketing. But the fact remains the cheapest Alpine is still more expensive than the cheapest Porsche.

I assume you are talking about the UK market, in which case I should point out that little England is not the centre of the Universe, certainly in terms of Alpine sales. In markets like France and Belgium, the Alpine is MUCH cheaper than a manual Porsche due to the "malus" appplied to the thirstier, manual car. 12k Cayman manual malus manual versus 1k for the Alpine makes a much bigger difference than bucket seats! (Plus of course the 25% higher fuel bills if you really want to be pedantic).

Edited by rick.e on Tuesday 2nd June 12:35

[rick.e]

blueg33 said:

Top gear compared the Cayman S with the A110 for acceleration

They were very close and the S is £10k more than the A110

Alpine A110 Porsche Cayman S

0-10 0.85 0.80
0-20 1.46 1.40
0-30 2.07 2.01
0-40 2.82 2.70
0-50 3.60 3.70
0-60 4.62 4.58
0-70 5.71 5.60
0-80 7.07 7.10
0-90 8.57 8.40
0-100 10.32 9.98
0-110 12.62 12.10
0-120 15.45 14.20

Shame you missed out the overtaking times, much more important on the road than 0-anything, and where the Alpine beat the S on some intervals.

[rick.e]

Lexington59 said:

So you’re going up against the established brand .....

.....or you are choosing between a mass produced car (25k Caymans per year) or a low volume car (<5000), so yes, apart from being a great car, the Alpine comes with exclusivity, which some people will pay for. (Same argument as Lotus). After 15 months of ownership, I still enjoy the way people cross the road to gather rounf my Alpine wherever I park up, where nobody even notices a Cayman drive by. An unexpected, and uncosted bonus, of driving an Alpine.

[Miserablegit]

Lexington59 said:

Making things up ? Porsche's figures are always conservative. Fastest laps indexes a lot of data from various tests. 0-60 is a case in point, Porsche quote 4.9 for the base PDK yet Car & Driver clocked it at 3.9.

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15098075/201...

I think the facts speak for themselves, I'll leave the spin to BCR..

Ha- Car & Driver use rolling starts so that renders the result pointless for these purposes (and, indeed, most purposes)

Point is the Alpine is priced very well- it is cheaper than the Porsche equivalent. I don’t consider a base-spec Cayman the equivalent.

Edited by Miserablegit on Tuesday 2nd June 13:30

[craigjm]

Every thread goes down this road. We know the Cayman is a great car, we know the Alpine is a great car. This addding up prices and looking at 10ths of a second etc is just so boring now. Ruins every alpine thread.

[lukeharding]

craigjm said:

Every thread goes down this road. We know the Cayman is a great car, we know the Alpine is a great car. This addding up prices and looking at 10ths of a second etc is just so boring now. Ruins every alpine thread.

It is a shame. I was in an Alpine on Sunday, and loved it. For me it feels like you're driving a spaceship (because I mostly drive older cars probably), but at one point a Cayman chased me down a little and followed me for a while. It was actually a lot of fun and I really liked the Cayman too. I don't know why it can't be a friendly rivalry between two great cars rather than a constant attempt to make one look rubbish.

[Miserablegit]

It is friendly but there are the same three Porsche fanboys who always interrupt an alpine thread with their nonsense.

[lukeharding]

Miserablegit said:

It is friendly but there are the same three Porsche fanboys who always interrupt an alpine thread with their nonsense.

Yes, I've read plenty of it. Sometimes (though its difficult), its just better not to rise to something you disagree with as it feeds the argument. If people want to have any bias then its their loss.

[Miserablegit]

Agreed but it seems good sport in lockdown!