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No [Lexus] RX350 in history has ever had a quality flaw. Any potential flaws are immediately handled by Lexus Service, who lets you borrow an LS460 for the weekend and explains to you how the defect was actually your fault, and you agree because you don’t want to be the first person in history to discover a quality flaw in an RX350. When you start thinking about selling your RX350, word gets out and one day you open your front door to find a line of people trying desperately to be the highest bidder for your Lexwagon even though your five-year-old just projectile-vomited a fermented Dairy Queen sundae into the center-console buttons last week and it’s still dripping out. All used RXes continue to be worth 81% of their resale value until they are raptured into heaven from beneath their sixth owners at the 500,000-mile mark, leaving behind a satisfied family of Somali immigrants clutching a certificate good for $21,000 trade-in on a new RX350.

That is the bar over which the Macaw must step. This is considerably more difficult than the market requirements for the 911, which are;

* Look like a 911

* Be more reliable than an ’87 Testarossa

* Or at least as reliable

*Or, failing that, be cheaper to fix

Those were conditions that Porsche could generally meet. But the cheaper the car, and/or the bigger the market, the higher the expectations. There’s a reason that you can buy a Cayenne Turbo S for $15,000 against an original MSRP of $143,000 just seven or eight years after it leaves Leipzig: it doesn’t meet expectations. The man who spent six figures on the Cayenne Turbo S can afford to take that loss, but his more modestly-accomplished younger brother can’t afford to take the same hit on his Macan. If you want to play in the mass market, you need to bring mass market skills to bear. There’s no evidence that Porsche has those skills. Which means that they will eventually fail, and they will fail on a scale from which there is no recovery.

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