Porsche Learned The Worst Lesson From Tesla, And It Sucks

For better or worse, Tesla has made a significant mark on the automobile industry. The American electric car manufacturer has influenced so much change in the last decade of car making, spurring the EV boom, pushing direct-to-consumer sales, and changing the meaning of a 0-60 time. One other thing that Tesla does, however, is offer extremely limited “free” paint colors. People have to either be willing to accept the standard paint or pony up another couple thousand dollars to get a good color. Porsche, like a grade-schooler who doesn’t know the answers and doesn’t think they’ll get caught, leaned over and took a look at Tesla’s homework.

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For nearly 20 years Porsche has offered four standard colors on its sports car models; black, white, Guards Red, and Speed Yellow (which was later changed to Racing Yellow). Guards Red has been an iconic Porsche color since the 1980s, and Speed Yellow is a modern classic. The SUVs and sedans typically offered colors as a no-cost option as well. For the 2025 model year, however, the brand has determined that if you want a colorful car, it’s going to cost you.

Excepting the 718 Boxster and Cayman, cars which are destined to end production shortly, every Porsche model on sale offers just black and white as standard colors. You can pay $840 for three different shades of grey and another blacker black. Guards Red went from the free list to costing $1,500, and Speed/Racing Yellow is gone altogether.

Screenshot: Porsche

Unlike Tesla, though, Porsche is more than willing to paint your car whatever color you want, so long as you pay for it. You can pay up to $2,980 for the “regular” colors, or you can choose from a much bigger list of pre-approved color choices for $14,190. If the color you want isn’t on that list, you can pay the equivalent of a Subaru Outback with the premium package for “Paint to Sample Plus.”

At the end of the day, $1,500 isn’t going to stop someone from getting their $120,000 base 911 in whatever color they want, but it’s still annoying that Tesla’s influence has spread through the industry in this manner. I want Speed Yellow, dammit. I guess I’ll have to settle for Cartagena Yellow, it’s a neat color anyway.

Now that that’s out of the way, lets talk about how Porsche still hasn’t made adaptive cruise control a standard feature, eh? That’s basically standard across the board on anything over $25,000 now. What’s going on over there in Stuttgart?