The Gemballa Mirage GT took Porsche's audacious Carrera GT and gave it more of everything. Today's Gemballa-aping Boxster also has more — more fiberglass, more inches between the wheels — but does it come with a price that should be less?

Less is more has long been the mantra of Swedish designers, and nowhere has that been more evident than in Volvo's boxy but good 200 family of cars. Conversely, the seller of yesterday's felt that more is more, having replaced that car's original four with an SBC, and with an 84% Nice Price win, it seemed that he didn't extend that theme to its price tag.

Volvos and V8s go together like Ikea furniture and orthogonality. Today's Nice Price or Crack Pipe…

Primer-painted Volvos with pushrod V8s and wind-up windows are about the simplest form of custom car life you could imagine, but at the other end of the evolutionary scale lies cars with existing bona fides going under the knife. Porsche has a history of building jaw dropping range-toppers, cars like the 959, and ten cylinder Carrera GT, but they typically have production numbers and price tags that are inversely related. That makes their accessibility to the more plebeian of Porsche fanatic more dubious than doable, and that means that some have to turn to the next best thing - plagiarism.

Right off the bat, this car isn't a real Gemballa Mirage GT, It's a that suffered egregiously enough at the hands of some individual to warrant a salvage title. Much like Peter Weller's eponymous - and mostly dead - character in RoboCop it has been given a new life through body enhancements. The real Carrera GT is a significantly larger car than the Boxster, and to accommodate this car's transformation the makers have done more than giving it a genital tuck, extending the space between the wheels by a full fruit by the foot. Of course, as the ladies all know, it ain't the length, it's the roundth.

In the Gemballa GT that space is taken up by a 685-bhp ten-cylinder, while in this homage Boxster it serves as an area for perhaps dwarf storage. That's because under the rearward hinged engine cover there sits the stock flat six that makes the Boxster such a sweet performer, but lacks the Chuck Norris-ness of the real Carrera GT. On the plus side, the car has the sort of shifter sprouting from the console, which is a 5-speed manual. That console is Boxster flat rather than GT swept, and in fact the interior is where much of the illusion of this conversion is shattered. Outside, however, there's a whole lot of Gemballa going on, of course instead of the carbon fiber of the nano-production real car, this one's all fiberglass.

Now, lest you think the bodywork is as impermanent as a politician's promise, there are a number of build shots in the eBay ad, as well as this assertion by the seller:

This car was built by the same people as seen on the SPEED Channel building a Carrera Gt from a boxster and on Kit Car magazine's COVER so they know their stuff.

Reassuring, don't you think?

The Fauxballa rides on tri-tone center lock alloys which match the black and red color scheme of the rest of the car. The front air dam and side skirts fan out from the car in such fashion that it looks as though it's melting into the pavement, and should make curbs, sleeping policemen, and Bots Dots lip-biting encounters. The black and red color mix extends to the interior where custom paint on the doors and leather on the seats attempt to make you forget you're staring at a Boxster instrument cluster. The car has a claimed 92K under its belt.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of fartery, and many of you may think this poseur Porsche really stinks up the place. In its defense, allow me to posit that it does two things which are both positive - it makes use of a salvage title Boxster, and brings the style of a wildly exclusive and unaffordable car to the masses. It's class warfare at its finest.

But is its price fine as well? The seller has set a buy it now of an oddly specific $44,777 for the car, and has received so far only a single bid well below the level required for immediate gratification. What do you think, is that a price that would make this Gemballa wannabe want-worthy? Or, is that still a diamond price tag for a cubic zirconia car?

You decide!

or go if the ad disappears.

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