---
title: "The Same Car, Since 1948 · HICONIUM"
description: "Seventy-eight years of one silhouette: our man for Porsche on air, obstinacy, and what the market pays a company for refusing to change its mind."
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![Art plate: the nose of a 1948 Porsche 356 roadster alone in a vast dark hall under one narrow shaft of light](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/art/356-hall-light.jpg.w1920.q75.webp)

The Journal · Porsche

# The Same Car, Since 1948

Seventy-eight years of one silhouette: our man for Porsche on air, obstinacy, and what the market pays a company for refusing to change its mind.

[Victor Max August Haehling von Lanzenauer Our man for Porsche · July 5, 2026 · 5 min](https://hiconium.com/journal/authors/victor-haehling-von-lanzenauer)

A 356 does not start so much as wake: choke out, two slow pumps of the throttle, a pause you learn not to rush. Then four air-cooled cylinders come up behind you, all tappets and fan, a dry mechanical mutter with nothing between it and the morning. There is no water in this engine, and there are no secrets either; what you hear at idle, cold, is the truth about the machine. My family’s has been in my keeping for eleven years. The ritual has never changed. Neither, and this is the entire point, has the car.

The first car to wear the name was built in 1948 in Gmünd, Carinthia, in a commandeered sawmill, because Stuttgart was in ruins and the sawmill was not. Ferry Porsche explained it later with a sentence every collector should be made to memorise: he had looked around, could not find the car he dreamed of, and decided to build it himself. The dream, inspected today, is almost embarrassingly modest. An aluminium body beaten by hand over wooden bucks, 585 kilograms, 35 horsepower from a Volkswagen engine turned back to front. Fifty-two cars left that valley before the company went home to Zuffenhausen. If you want one now, the polite estimate runs to seven figures: the market has concluded that the least car Porsche ever built is one of the most valuable.

![Ferry Porsche as a young man, in herringbone tweed](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/the-same-car-since-1948/ferry-porsche-portrait.jpg.w828.q75.webp)

Ferry Porsche. He looked around, could not find the car, built it.

![Art plate: a 356 Speedster at night on wet cobblestones, roundel blank](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/art/print-speedster.jpg.w1920.q75.webp)

![Art plate: the 356 No. 1 Roadster in bare aluminium under one cone of light](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/art/print-356-no1.jpg.w1920.q75.webp)

![Art plate: a Carrera RS 2.7 mid-corner at night, dust in the headlight wash](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/art/print-rs27.jpg.w1920.q75.webp)

Everything since has been one argument, patiently continued. The 911 of 1963 is the 356’s idea said louder: engine at the back, seats for two adults and two optimists, a silhouette you can draw with a single line. Porsche called it 901 until Peugeot pointed out that it owned the zero in the middle, so Stuttgart swapped the zero for a one and carried on as if nothing had happened. Every rival engineer called the rear engine a mistake, and every rival engineer was right: it is the wrong place for an engine, as any pendulum will tell you. Porsche’s answer was not to move it. Porsche’s answer was six decades of making the mistake work until the mistake became the doctrine, and the doctrine became the marque.

Twice the company tried to kill its own creation. In 1977 the 928 arrived, front-engined, water-cooled, civilised: the designated successor, and by most measurements then in use a better car. The customers ignored the measurements. By 1995 the 928 was gone; the 911 was still there, unembarrassed. The second attempt ended in January 1981, in a Zuffenhausen planning office, where the incoming chief executive, an American named Peter Schutz, found a chart with the 911’s production line stopping just ahead. He picked up a marker and drew the line onward: off the chart, across the wall. Nobody has dared stop it since. The replacement died first.

> Refusal, it turns out, compounds.

![Art plate: macro of a vintage Porsche chrome headlight rim and fluted lens, dust in one shaft of light](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/art/detail-headlight.jpg.w3840.q75.webp)

The instrument, examined.

The market has been auditing this stubbornness ever since, and its findings are not subtle. Max Hoffman wanted a stripped 356 he could sell in America for less than three thousand dollars, so the Speedster listed at $2’995 in 1954; a clean one now costs a hundred times the sticker. In 1972 the sales department doubted that anyone would take the five hundred Carrera RS 2.7s homologation required; the first batch sold out within days of the Paris show, Porsche built 1’580 in the end, at 34’000 Deutschmarks apiece, and the best of them are seven-figure cars today. When the air-cooled engine was finally retired with the last 993 in the spring of 1998, sacrificed to water and regulation, the mourning expressed itself in the only language this market speaks. In the decade that followed, the old air-cooled cars did not appreciate; they multiplied.

Once, and only once, the patience broke. In the spring of 1969 the homologation inspectors walked into the courtyard at Zuffenhausen and found twenty-five 917s parked nose to tail, a racing car conjured in ten months out of corporate fury at losing Le Mans. Porsche offered them to private teams at 140’000 Deutschmarks apiece and struggled to find takers, because the men who had driven one talked. At 320 on the Mulsanne, the early 917 steered like a rumour. Porsche pinned it down, won Le Mans twice, and retired the beast; in 2017 the 917K that had starred beside Steve McQueen crossed a stage at Pebble Beach for fourteen million dollars, and no Porsche has brought more under a hammer. We keep the complete file on that car in this house. It is not a calm read.

![Porsche 917K in Gulf livery, the colours of the Le Mans film car](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/cars/porsche-917/art/gulf.jpg.w1920.q75.webp)

The 917 in Gulf colours: the livery of the film car that made fourteen million dollars.

[From the house files Porsche 917 · The complete file Records, provenance, and the ascent from unsellable to priceless.](https://hiconium.com/vehicles/porsche/917)

![A silver Porsche 356 pre-A at speed, its driver waving](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/the-same-car-since-1948/356-solitude-revival.jpg.w3840.q75.webp)

Seventy years on, still being driven the way it was built to be.

Porsche claims that more than two thirds of all the cars it has ever built are still on the road. Nobody has audited the number, and nobody needs to: walk any paddock on a Sunday morning and count. That is the return on building the same car for seventy-eight years against all advice, and it is why the valuations in these files move the way they do. You are not pricing a machine. You are pricing a promise kept since 1948, and a kept promise is the rarest asset class there is.

The oil in ours takes eleven minutes to come to temperature, which I know because the car has told me so a thousand mornings in a row, always in the same voice. It is warm now. Excuse me.