Porsche has officially walked back its plan to sell the next-generation 718 Cayman and Boxster as electric-only sports cars, the clearest sign yet that the company’s EV timeline collided with reality on the way to market.
The reversal became company policy in September 2025, when Porsche’s own newsroom announced what it called a realignment of its product strategy. CEO Oliver Blume said the lineup “is to be supplemented by brand-defining vehicle models with combustion engines,” and that Porsche wants “a convincing mix of combustion engines, plug-in hybrids and battery-electric vehicles” to cover the full range of customer demand, according to Porsche’s official statement. The same announcement confirmed the Panamera and Cayenne will keep combustion and plug-in hybrid versions well into the 2030s.
That company-wide statement set up a more specific about-face for the 718 twins. Porsche had planned to end combustion Cayman and Boxster production and launch a pure-EV successor as early as 2025, phasing out the gas engine as regulations tightened on both sides of the Atlantic. By December 2025, engineers at Porsche’s Weissach development center were reportedly reworking the sports car’s electric-only platform to fit a mid-mounted combustion engine again, according to Autocar’s reporting relayed by CarExpert. A senior engineer told the outlet the math had simply changed: “The electric Boxster and Cayman risked becoming a niche. Euro 7 changed the arithmetic,” a reference to Europe’s diluted emissions rules, finalized only after Porsche had already bet the model line on going electric.
The flip-flop outlasted a change at the top of the company. Michael Leiters, who left McLaren to become Porsche’s CEO on January 1, 2026, reportedly spent his early months weighing whether to scrap the electric 718 outright before settling the question in public. In an August 2026 interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Leiters confirmed the EV version will still be built: “With the electric 718, we came to the conclusion that we will build the model, because it is the best solution economically and will be a fantastic car.” He stopped short of detailing the combustion variant’s production plans in that interview, leaving that half of the equation still not fully spelled out even as Porsche’s broader strategy keeps pointing toward extending gas power for years.
For buyers, the practical upshot is simple. Porsche misjudged how fast the market would move to electric power, and it’s now paying engineers to build two completely different drivetrain architectures into one platform rather than betting the whole model line on one technology. That kind of hedge is expensive, but it also means the manual-transmission, flat-six-powered 718 that enthusiasts actually line up for isn’t disappearing on the timeline Porsche originally drew up. Given how far Porsche’s EV volumes have lagged its own targets, betting against a durable market for gas-powered sports cars looks like the riskier position right now.