Can the Next Porsche 911 Resist Substantial Design Changes?
Over time, there have been any number of cars that have been called iconic. But when you think about it, how many are built today?
It may take years to gain some perspective before comfortably using that term. But I think few would disagree that if any automobile built today deserves iconic status, it would be the Porsche 911.
For over 60 years the 911 has been the definition of Porsche to automotive enthusiasts, as well as dentists, lawyers, and others who pronounced “Porsche” monosyllabically.
And why not? Few sports cars combined the performance, agility, quality, and importantly, the day-to-day usability that the 911 did, and still does. While Porsche builds various models today, for many years the 911 was the only car Porsche produced. For many, it still is.
Apart from this, everything is different.
The evolution of the 911 has been well documented, so I won’t rehash it here. But a side view comparison of the two shows how much has changed as well as how the original is still very much present.
991 generation 911 behind the 1964 original.
It’s as if they took the 901 and added all the standard designer’s tricks—huge wheels and tires, drop the car, squash the upper—which, of course they did.
And the result is sensational. The car looks like a “sketch.” That’s a high designer compliment for a car that looks like the original (exaggerated) design sketch.
While the 901 was almost slab-sided, the current car has pronounced wheel flairs that not only provide some beautifully developed surfaces (especially the rear-quarter) but also give the car a wider, planted, road worthy presence.
2019 Porsche 911 Carrera.
Of course, the car is wider, housing much thicker rubber than the original, and longer as well. In fact, it’s a full 10 inches longer and wider than the 901, a reflection on how contemporary cars have grown over the years.
And while other cars that now share the Porsche showroom, like the Taycan and new Macan, have a slightly edgier, now current Porsche form philosophy, the 911 retains the organic, soft surface development with hardly an edge to it.
It’s amazing that a car this old can still look completely modern and retain its fundamental distinctiveness.
Kudos to the Porsche Design team for nurturing and refining a car that in some ways should have been written off years ago. After all, how many rear-engine cars have you seen lately?
In the early ‘30s, European automotive designers were just beginning to embrace aerodynamic principles.
Those principles had largely been established a decade before by Paul Jaray, a former Zeppelin company aerodynamicist who after WWI applied those ideas to the automobile.
Around the same time there was a renewed interest in mounting the engine in the rear, so that the period produced vehicles that employed both preliminary aerodynamics and rear powertrains.
Porsche had designed such a vehicle for Zundapp, the Type 12 in 1931. A similar prototype, the Type 32 was developed for NSU, looking very much like an inflated version of the Volkswagen, the development of which would begin in earnest in 1934.
Original Porsche 911 next to Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Coupé (991) in 2018.
In that same year, Czechoslovakia’s Tatra (using Jaray patents) would show the T77, a large luxurious vehicle with a rear-mounted air-cooled V8. With its large rear center fin, it had the look of a car Flash Gordon would drive. It would go into production in various forms for many years.
Dutch-born John Tjaarda’s design for a rear-engine streamliner was shown at the Ford exhibit at the 1933-34 Chicago’s World Fair. That vehicle, radically restyled and with a front engine, would provide the basis for the 1936 Lincoln Zephyr.
So, when Porsche began to build the car that would bear his name, it was very much a product of what he had learned and done before—that of a small, aerodynamically efficient vehicle with a rear engine, but this time designed specifically as a sporting machine.
In today’s environment it’s difficult to judge where Porsche will take the 911 next. Will there be an electric version? Hard to conceive of a car that’s built its reputation on rear-engine-biased road dynamics maintaining that with electric motors.
Then again, through oodles of development time and money, Porsche has tamed just about every negative dynamic trait inherent in a rear-engine chassis, making today’s version about as benign as possible—something that could not be said of its predecessors.
If they can do that, they can likely tune a chassis to feel like a rear engine, even if there’s no engine back there anymore. Still, some purists still haven’t forgiven Porsche for making the 911 water cooled.
Whatever Porsche decides for the car, there is one thing we can be sure of: It will always look like a 911.
Because if there’s one thing Porsche has learned over the years, you don’t mess with an icon.
