FEB 2005 (ISSUE 131)

Digging around in the Feb 2005 issue and we’re debating why certain 911s had fallen out of favour and were being comfortably outsold by previous generation models. It was certainly a trend of its time, although one model is still sufferring today, and that’s unlikely to change. Why, we asked, was the Carrera 3.2 in more demand than the clearly better 964 and why was the 996 being outperformed by the 993? And why was the 911SC on the floor price wise, with cars slumping to £7000? Why indeed?

Time is a great healer, of course, and you would be hard pushed to slip a fiver between the relative values of all these cars now except, of course, for the 996. We perhaps didn’t quite cotton on at the time, but that was because of the great water and air-cooled divide, and the sheer number of modern 996s that Porsche built. Still, even the 996 is appreciating now, for the right model in the right condition, of course.

Elsewhere, we took a look and a drive in a reader’s 944. Nothing unusual there, except that this very standard looking Guards Red Lux model was fitted with an LPG conversion. With the price of a litre of petrol heading for the £1 mark, LPG at 32p a litre (seriously), thanks to favourable green credentials tax, made a lot of sense. In fact it still does and there are plenty of Euro countries where you can buy brand new, manufacturer built LPG cars. Just not here. And what was it like to drive? Well, just like a normal petrol 944, really. We have in subsequent years and issues driven a few LPG Cayennes and another 944 S2, but LPG never really seems to have taken off here in the UK. We must really like fuel duty, I guess!