The relationship between a 911 and its owner is important to its significance as an object. A 911 is not a car for everyone. A Porsche press kit recently proclaimed that it was a car that was not meant to be something to everyone, but rather was meant to be everything to someone, which perfectly sums up the car. Today, a significant percentage of the people who own 911’s are unaware of the unique history of the car and as my father notes, they no longer know how to drive, which was not the case in the 1970’s. The cars no longer require any significant skill to drive and a lot of their personality is gone, which is why I have focused on the earlier cars here.

Most purists agree that the 993 generation car was the last of the originals and the values for these cars, which should just be “used cars”, are accordingly strong. The current cars are objectively better cars: faster, easier to live with, more practical, etc., but have lost a lot of the soul that was once there. This has allowed the 911 (and Porsche) to become a greater commercial success, and it is reassuring to know that the engineers are still the same people. Driving a current car with enthusiasm or on the track reveals that the critical ingredients that define the 911 are still present. Ferry Porsche’s goal “to build sports cars that were reliable, of high quality, and of high utilitarian value” are still being admirably met and the fundamental concept behind the car and its format is still present. It is still a rear-engined sports car with a horizontally opposed six-cylinder engine and among today’s cars, it is certainly one of the most unique, capable, and all around practical sports cars you can buy.

Brand loyalty is fierce among Porsche-philes, and owning a 911 has many different implications for different owners. For some, it is the history, for some, the engineering, for some, the aesthetics. For most, it is a combination of all these things and others. There is a story associated with each 911 and the 911 as a whole, not unlike the Mini as we discussed in class, though arguably, the story associated with a 911 is not quite as contrived.

Because of the 911’s unique role as a world-class sports car that is also usable, many owners drive them every day, which means that they also have more memories associated with them, and in turn more people buy them. It is a perpetual process and the car has been kept fresh to sustain the process. In fact, Porsche introduced a car that was to replace the 911 in the late 1970’s, which ended up going out of production while the 911 has soldiered on. The 928 was a conventional front-engined car powered by a liquid-cooled V8, which has sometimes earned it the nickname of “the German Corvette”. It was reasonably successful, but never attracted the following of the 911 and was quietly retired after nearly twenty years in production, in 1995.

For many owners, owning a 911 is a part of one’s identity, not as a superficial and materialistic expression of social station, but rather as an object to express their approach towards life, and even as a companion. Working at a dealer of exotic cars (www.fantasyjunction.com), I can see the emotional component of cars all the time. People bring them with them as they move, define phases of their lives by them, and fight over them, in much the same way they do with people. This emotional attachment makes the car a sort of member of the family. The 911 my father had when I was a small child was called “Blue Boy” (he can be seen standing next to it in one the photos I included), and I was heart-broken the day he sold it. The day in 1990 that we brought home the red 1989 Speedster pictured extensively elsewhere in this study is my earliest memory that I can pinpoint. I was sitting at our dining table eating a bowl of cottage cheese with fruit salad in it out of a white bowl when the man from the dealer who was delivering the car pulled up in it (incidentally the same thing I am eating right now as I write this).

For a lot of enthusiasts, the 911 is much more than a car, but rather a type of life. We have a poster in our garage that proclaims that “once you own a Porsche, there is no other type of car” and features a tangerine Targa like my dad’s old one driving across a moonlit beach. At this point, it is interesting to note that Porsche essentially refers to 911, even though Porsche has made plenty of other models such as the 914, 928, 944, and more recently, the Boxster and the Cayenne. The 911 is truly the quintessential Porsche, and in some ways, the quintessential sports car. Asking the average person to conjur up an image of a sports car usually produces a 911, and it was recently voted by an English magazine (Sports and Classic Car) as the third greatest car of all time, after the Ford Model T and the Volkswagen Beetle (which after all, mobilized generations of people).

Porsche Club event sightings: The 911 as a way of life, and the 911 as a practical (-ish) sports car.

More from the Porsche Club: owners prepare their cars for concours judging.

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