54 years and one million Porsche 911s
05/13/2017
It's an almost unbelievable story. The Porsche company presented the 901 (later renamed the 911) at the IAA in 1963, creating a sports car icon that is still being built 54 years later and has saved the Porsche company from ruin on more than one occasion.
There were also potential successors, the Porsche 928 for example, but somehow modernity could not prevail against the rear-engine concept, which was actually already outdated in the mid-sixties. Whenever anyone dared to try something new in Zuffenhausen, the "cast-iron" people cried out.
And so Porsche remained true to the 911 and modernized it as much as necessary. Apart from the rear engine and the silhouette, a modern 911, now called the 991, has hardly anything to do with its ancestor, because where once air cooling and carburetors were installed, today there is modern water-cooled engine technology with fuel injection. After all, there are (still) six cylinders that provide propulsion in boxer form, but even this "limitation" is likely to be hotly debated in Zuffenhausen, as it is much easier to achieve emission limits with a turbocharged four-cylinder engine.
Not even its creators believed that the 911 would one day reach one million units produced and be built for more than half a century. Only the Corvette from General Motors can look back on a similar success story; it too has remained true to its basic concept - front engine, two-seater plastic body.
To mark the production anniversary, Porsche produced an Irish green model of the Carrera S , which is reminiscent of the original 911 in many details. And we dedicated a picture magic episode to those early 911 models a while ago. There are even more 911 models in another picture magic episode, which covers all years.
