NEWS AND EVENTS
Porsche 911 hits the million milestone; events in California, Malta and Wales; new McLaren tested
AT 09.30 HOURS on 11 May 2017, the millionth Porsche 911 – a Carrera S, specially finished in Irish Green, with gold badging – drove off the end of the production line at the Zuffenhausen factory. That’s 52 years, seven months and 27 days since the first customer production 911 did the same thing on 14 September 1964, a year after the prototype 901 had been revealed at the Frankfurt show.
On the one hand, that’s a lot of 911s. On the other, why did it take so long? That depends on whether you view the 911 as a specialist sports car with enough appeal to make a lot of people want one, or a mass-produced car with expensive components tailored to expensive tastes. The answer, of course, is a bit of both.
The mass-production dimension has become more significant in recent years, with production rates far higher than they were back in the air-cooled days. The water-cooled cars, beginning with the 996 generation in 1997, were quicker and cheaper to build thanks to the components and frontal structure they shared with the Boxster, an arrangement that continues with today’s 991.
It has not simply been a story of everincreasing production rates, though. From small beginnings – 3300 cars made in 1965, the first full year, which is about a tenth of current rates – production climbed until the 1970s energy crisis and the tightening of US emissions rules. These depressed sales as quickly as they neutered the engines’ power outputs. Sales recovered in the late 1970s, then sank again as Porsche tried ever harder to disown its dated sports car of flawed design in favour of embracing a front-engined, water-cooled future.
Fortunately a new chairman, German-born American Peter Schutz, arrived in 1980 to save the rear-engined thread that had always been central to Porsche’s being. He famously looked at the predicted production graph of the
company’s then three model lines displayed on his office wall, noted that the 911’s stopped at 1981, and extended it off the edge of the chart. As a result, the 911 received revised engines and the resuscitated Carrera name, a cabriolet was added, and we know the rest.
Well over half a century from its birth, and despite now being the only production car with an overhanging engine mounted longitudinally at the rear, the 911 idea seems immortal even if nothing of the original car remains beyond its outline architecture.
As for the millionth 911, it will do a world tour to include the Nürburgring, the Scottish Highlands, the USA and China. Assuming it survives all that, it will reside in Porsche’s museum thereafter.
Naturally, production has continued since that date in May. Here’s to the arrival of the two-millionth 911.