Porsche: “No matter what, we build sports cars.” Or not.

Not that it didn't contradict a couple of years of excitement-generating, headline-making news reports, but was anyone really surprised when Porsche announced that it would not sell a popularly priced sports car, the one it was for the last three years officially rumored to be developing for joint use with Volkswagen and Audi?

Porsche is in the middle stages of a full-on image recalibration, from focused maker of first-quality sports cars to all-purpose purveyor of big, expensive, and too often nasty things. So a reminder that a cheaper, smaller, fine-handling model -- to introduce younger, more broke and more frugal citizens to the brand and into the sports car fold -- does not appeal to current management ought hardly be a revelation.

"To build a Porsche for 30,000 euros [$37,800 at current exchange rates] currently doesn't fit our brand," Bernhard Maier, the company's head of sales and marketing and a Porsche board member, told an Automotive News convention in Monaco the other week, adding, "The extraordinary purchase experience is not for free and the entry price [level] is currently covered with the Boxster and in the future by the Macan." As if $45,000-50,000 (loaded, the way you know any $38,000 Porsche would come,) was something akin to free.

Newly addicted to building things that aren't sports cars — more than half of its sales are currently two-and-a-half-ton Cayenne SUVs — Porsche is now scurrying to ready its new, smaller but still weighty soft-roader, the Macan (based on the Audi Q5, itself based on the none-too-small Audi A4 and A5 platform) for a 2014 release. And then there is the apparent success of the Panamera — the ungainly beast has sold better than many predicted, confirming this writer's suspicion that when you're trolling for megabucks you can't be too large or too vulgar; ideally, it seems, you're both.

Finally, of course there is the imminent arrival of the incredible 918 Spyder, which promises to be a technological tour de force, a hyper-costly (estimated $845,000, to start) showpiece for lightweight materials. The world's fastest hybrid, it will still tip the scales, however, at more than 3300 lbs., meaning it will still somehow manage to weigh more than a 911 or even a Cadillac ATS. Not that I'd throw one out of bed for eating crackers.

All in all, Porsche is emboldened -- not to mention corporately beholden (to its Volkswagen masters, who want to squeeze as much profit out of every platform they make) -- to build every expensive bauble or damn fool non-sports car it can sell if it might deliver margins or help the brand reach its sales target of 200,000 cars a year by 2018. Roughly double recent volume, it's been set as part of VW's drive to become the world's largest carmaker. And while Maier & Co. object to an entry-level sports car that only costs forty grand, they've no problem with a so-called entry-level SUV Porsche. Go figure.

Maybe the sports car market isn't what it was. Maybe it's not just the dearth of relevant models that retards demand, but rather the people's desire for riding high and mighty in jacked up crossovers. Or maybe Porsche doesn't view its essence in the way it once did. Porsche owners paid a relatively modest premium to step up to a serious and seriously efficient German sports car in the past —especially in the company's formative 1950s and 1960s heyday — but that audience is tended to now with but a line item or two on the business plan.

We may never know how fine a cheap Porsche this new one was shaping up to be, for the sad part, though no one's saying it, is that the Zuffenhauseners' abdication may spell curtains for the whole Volkswagen BlueSport concept, analogues of which were in its original brief supposed to be shared by VW with Audi and Porsche to help make the economic case for this new sportster's specialized platform. As first shown at the 2009 Detroit auto show, BlueSport was a lightweight mid-engine roadster. But it was also designed to be brand-able in various ways, with a brilliantly versatile architecture that could also accommodate front- and rear-engine[1] layouts in addition to a middle positioning, affording the most striking brand differentiator there is. And those variously located engines were to have drawn from the VW group's arsenal of choice small motors, gas, diesel and electric, each of which could plausibly be associated with the brand in whose $40,000 sports car it resided.