Auf Wiedersehen, 928

Porsche built a car to replace the 911. The 911 declined to be replaced. Eighteen years and 61,056 cars later, the 928 GTS walked out of Zuffenhausen as the finest grand tourer Stuttgart ever built — and almost nobody bought it.

There is a particular kind of car that gets everything right and still loses. Not a flawed car. Not a compromised one. A car that is measurably, demonstrably, provably better than the thing it was fighting — and that loses anyway, because the fight was never about merit. The Porsche 928 is the patron saint of that category. It is the valedictorian who didn't get into the fraternity.

Porsche spent most of the 1970s convinced that the 911 was finished. Ernst Fuhrmann, an engineer of enormous ability and roughly zero sentimentality, looked at a rear-engined, air-cooled sports car with a reputation for snapping around on lift-off and saw a design that was out of runway. Noise regulations were tightening. American crash and emissions rules were tightening harder. The 911 was a 1960s answer to a 1960s question, and Fuhrmann wanted a 1980s car for the 1980s.

So Porsche did something it had never done: it started from absolutely nothing. No carryover platform. No borrowed drivetrain. A clean sheet, a big budget, and a brief that read something like build the best car in the world and put it in front of the 911 in the showroom.

What came out was a water-cooled, all-aluminum V8 mounted up front, a torque tube running back to a transaxle sitting over the rear axle, weight distribution within a whisker of 50/50, aluminum doors and hood and front fenders over a steel monocoque, and a rear suspension so clever it got its own name. And a body that, nearly fifty years later, still doesn't look like anything else that has ever been built.

Part OneNothing on Earth Looked Like It

The shape came from Wolfgang Möbius, working under design chief Anatole "Tony" Lapine, a Latvian-born ex-General Motors man Porsche had poached out of Opel. Möbius's first sketches went where everyone's sketches were going in 1974 — wedges, creases, folded paper, the Italian house style. Lapine threw that out. He wanted something rounder, softer, stranger, and completely without fashion, on the theory that fashion has an expiration date printed on it.

He said the quiet part out loud at launch: a car that everybody likes immediately will not hold up over time.

He was right, and it cost him. The 928 arrived at Geneva in March 1977 looking like a raindrop running backward — blunt, wide, high-hipped nose tapering into a long fastback tail that Lapine refused to hang a wing on. "Spoilers and wheel flares just show that the engine and suspension exceed the shape," he said, which is either the most arrogant thing a designer has ever said or the most confident, and in his case both. Early 928s had neither.

Look at it from three-quarter front and it is unmistakably a fish. Wide-set, blank, faintly amused. Then the headlights come up out of the fenders — not flipping forward like a Countach, not rotating like a Corvette, but rising, standing up out of the bodywork on their little stalks like eyes on a hammerhead — and the fish becomes a shark. Porsche never once used the word. Everybody who has ever owned one has.

The most theatrical two seconds in 1980s motoring

The details were quietly revolutionary and nobody noticed at the time because they didn't look like anything. Body-colored polyurethane bumpers, integrated front and rear, at a moment when every other manufacturer was bolting federally mandated railroad ties onto otherwise pretty cars. Getting flexible polyurethane and steel and aluminum to wear the same shade of paint was a genuine chemistry problem in 1977. Porsche solved it, and in doing so invented the way every car on the road looks now. You can't see it because you've never seen a car without it.

Underneath, the Weissach axle: a rear suspension whose bushings were engineered to toe the outside rear wheel in under deceleration, passively steering the tail back into line at precisely the moment a 911 would have been trying to swap ends with you. Passive rear-wheel steering, in a road car, in 1977. It was the 928's mission statement rendered in rubber and geometry — this one will not bite you.

The interior was, if anything, further ahead. The instrument binnacle was bolted to the steering column, so when you raised or lowered the wheel the gauges came with it and the dials never disappeared behind the rim. Simple. Obvious. Almost nobody does it even now. The dash raked toward the driver, the center console rose up between the seats into what the press insisted on calling a cockpit, and early cars could be ordered with Pasha — a black-and-white checkerboard fabric that looks like a migraine and that I would order without hesitation.

Europe's motoring journalists gave it the 1978 European Car of the Year award. It remains the only sports car ever to win it. Then the buying public, having read every glowing word, walked into Porsche dealerships and bought 911s.

Part TwoThe Man Who Drew a Line Off the End of the Chart

The 928's problem was never the 928. It was that Porsche had built a replacement for a car that flatly refused to die.

911 sales sagged in the late seventies — down to 8,757 in 1981 — and Fuhrmann took that as confirmation. Then in 1981 Ferry Porsche fired him and hired Peter Schutz — a Berlin-born engineer whose Jewish family had fled the Nazis for a two-year stopover in Havana before settling in Chicago when he was eleven. Schutz grew up American, trained as a mechanical engineer, spent fifteen years at Caterpillar and eleven more at Cummins, had never run a car company in his life, and had, it turned out, exactly the right instincts.

The story Schutz told for the rest of his life is more precise than the shorthand version usually repeats. He walked into development chief Helmuth Bott's office and found a wall chart plotting three lines — 911, 928, and the incoming entry-level 944 — with the 911's line stopping dead in 1981. That wasn't a projection anyone was worried about. It was the board's own decision, made before Schutz had ever set foot in Stuttgart: wind the 911 down, and let the 928 and 944 carry Porsche into the future. Schutz picked up a marker off Bott's desk, drew the 911's line straight off the edge of the chart, across the wall, and out the door. "Do we understand each other?" he asked. Bott, reportedly, grinned and nodded. They did.

It worked. 911 sales climbed to 21,814 by 1985. And the 928 — through no fault of its own, having done nothing but be excellent — was now a very expensive car occupying the top of the range of a company whose sales chart was being carried by the thing it was built to bury.

The 928 never outsold the 911 in a single year of its life. It never came close. Its best years didn't crack 5,600 cars.

Here's the detail worth sitting with, because it turns a footnote into an argument. The plan Schutz tore up in his third week wasn't a rumor or a hedge somebody was quietly entertaining. It was written down. Porsche's own board had decided to retire the 911 and hand its future to the 928 and the cheaper, four-cylinder 944 waiting behind it. The 928 was never simply sharing a showroom with the 911. It had been engineered from a blank sheet specifically to end it.

It didn't end it. And the longer the two cars sat side by side, the more lopsided the outcome became. The 911's second generation alone — the G-series, built from 1974 to 1989 — accounted for nearly 200,000 cars, more than three times the 928's entire eighteen-year production run, built in roughly the same stretch of years. The 911 has now been in continuous, unbroken production since 1963 — sixty-plus years without a single gap — and has passed 1.2 million cars built. The 928 built 61,056, stopped completely in 1995, and has never had a direct successor wear its name.

So here is the irony, and I don't think it's a stretch to call it one: Porsche built the 928 specifically to replace the 911, and it is entirely possible that the 928's existence is part of what saved it. Not because anyone at Porsche in 1977 was hoping their new flagship would underperform — nobody plans that. But because the market's stubborn preference for the older car was exactly the evidence Schutz needed, in his third week on the job, to override a decision the board had already made on paper. If the 928 had sold the way it was engineered to sell, there is no chart to draw a line off of. There may be no 911 left to save.

Why didn't it sell the way it was supposed to? Take your pick of explanations, because the honest answer is probably all of them at once. Buyers weren't ready to trade an air-cooled flat-six with a growing mythology behind it for a water-cooled V8 that looked like nothing else on the road. The styling was radical on purpose, and radical is always a hard sell against an icon. And by 1977 the 911 already had a following too entrenched to be talked out of anything by a spec sheet, however superior — brand loyalty of that depth isn't rational, and Porsche's own customers proved it by choosing the older car, year after year, for eighteen straight years.

None of that makes the 928 a failure. It makes it something stranger and more interesting: the car that was supposed to end an era, and instead may have quietly guaranteed that the era would continue.

The car Porsche should not have built. We're glad that it did.

Part ThreeThe Renditions

What follows is eighteen years of Porsche doing the only thing it knows how to do when a car isn't selling, which is make it better. Over and over. Relentlessly. Until it was, by any honest measure, the finest car the company built — at which point they stopped.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, in August 1986, Porsche sent Al Holbert — IMSA legend, three-time Le Mans winner, head of Porsche Motorsport in North America — to the Bonneville Salt Flats with a pre-production S4. The car had been to Nardò first, where it reportedly nudged past 180 mph. At Bonneville, running an extended underbody pan, no mirrors, seven-inch wheels all round and Pirellis shaved to almost no tread and pumped to 64 psi, Holbert was timed by USAC at 171.110 mph over the flying mile and 171.926 mph over the kilometer.

Porsche's marketing department, which had been waiting years for something like this, declared the 928 S4 the fastest catalyst-equipped production car in the world. Which was true, and also — as 928 owners have been happily pointing out to each other for forty years — mostly a function of the fact that nobody else had bothered to show up and contest the record. Both things can be true. That's rather the 928's whole deal.

Part FourGTS: The Best One, and the Last One

The GTS is the car this article is really about, because the GTS is what happens when a company spends fifteen years fixing something it should have canceled and then, right at the end, briefly forgets to be sensible.

It replaced both the S4 and the GT in one move. The V8 was stroked to 5.4 liters — 345 horsepower, and more to the point 369 lb-ft of torque arriving at 4,250 rpm, which in a car of this shape means the middle of the rev range feels like a freight elevator. The rear track went out two inches and the arches were flared to cover it, sitting on 17-inch wheels wearing 225/45s up front and 255/40s at the back. The front rotors and calipers came straight off the 911 Turbo.

Then Porsche priced it at just under $81,000 for its 1993 US debut, climbing to $82,260 by 1995, and a properly optioned car could clear six figures. In 1995. For a coupe designed in 1974.

Read that acceleration figure again, then read the transmission next to it. Five-three to sixty with the automatic. In 1993, when a Ferrari 348 was doing 5.6 and needed a clutch, a nagging Italian temperament and a service department on retainer to do it.

And then look at the last line. Four hundred and six cars for the entire United States across three model years. Seventy-seven for 1995. Twenty-six of those with a manual gearbox. There are apartment buildings in Los Angeles with more units than there are 1995 manual 928 GTSs in America.

Part FiveDeutsche Treats: the GTS versus the 8 Series

In 1992, Car and Driver put the new 928 GTS against BMW's E31 850i, and the resulting story is the single best snapshot of what the 928 actually was.

The setup was almost comically even. The Porsche was around $90,000 as tested; the BMW was $91,017. Both were German, both were V-engined two-doors with an enormous amount of technology and an enormous amount of self-regard. The 850i had a 5.0-liter V12, frameless windows that dropped a half-inch when you touched the door handle, and the most advanced electronic architecture in any car on earth. It was gorgeous. It is still gorgeous.

It also made 296 horsepower, weighed a great deal more, and needed 7.2 seconds to reach 60 mph and 15.6 to complete the quarter at 93 mph.

The Porsche did 5.3 and 13.8.

The BMW won on interior comfort and noise isolation. It lost on steering feel, on chassis balance, on suspension tuning, on brakes, and on the entire business of being a car you actively want to drive. Car and Driver handed it to the Porsche and did not agonize about it.

Part SixWhat It Is Actually Like

You sit low, but not in it the way you sit in a 911. The seat is broad and flat-ish and unmistakably German — firm in the way that feels punitive for twenty minutes and correct for the next eight hours. The wheel is thin-rimmed by modern standards. You adjust it up or down, and the entire gauge pod moves with it, and something in your brain that didn't know it was annoyed by every other car quietly relaxes.

Ahead of you is a hood that goes on for a while. To either side, the fenders swell up into two soft peaks that you can actually see, which makes placing the car on a road weirdly easy for something 74 inches wide.

Then you start it, and the V8 does not do what you expect a Porsche to do. There's no metallic thrash, no air-cooled clatter, no sense that something is being wound up behind your head. It's a deep, even, slightly distant rumble — closer to an American V8 that went to graduate school in Stuttgart than to anything else in the catalog. At idle it is almost apologetic. Above 4,000 rpm it turns into something else entirely, a hard flat blare with a metallic edge on it that you feel in the back of the seat before you hear it.

And it moves in a way that is very hard to describe to somebody raised on turbos. There is no step. No surge. The 5.4 just gathers, and gathers, and the horizon starts arriving faster than it should, and you look down and you're doing a speed that would be a felony in most of the country and the car is at 3,800 rpm and completely unbothered.

It doesn't feel fast. It feels inevitable. There's a difference, and the difference is the whole point of a grand tourer.

Through corners it is heavier than a 911 and it never pretends otherwise. It leans a little. It breathes with the road. But the Weissach axle does exactly what it was built to do — you can lift mid-corner, which in a contemporary 930 was a genuinely life-altering decision, and the 928 simply tightens its line and carries on. The transaxle balance means it rotates around a point somewhere under your hips instead of trying to pivot around a mass behind the rear wheels. It is not a scalpel. It is a very, very good long knife.

And then there's the hatch. Enormous glass, hinged high, opening onto a load bay that will take two large suitcases, a set of golf clubs, a case of wine and a camera bag with the rear seats up. This is not incidental. This is the entire argument. The 928 is a two-plus-two hatchback that will cross Nevada at a hundred miles an hour, hold four adults in a pinch, swallow their luggage, and arrive with everyone still speaking to each other.

Part SevenHollywood Called. Porsche Never Picked Up.

Here is a thing everybody assumes and almost nobody checks: that Porsche, panicking about 928 sales, pushed the car into the movies.

It didn't. And the proof is the most famous Porsche scene ever filmed.

Risky Business, 1983. A gold 1979 928 on phone-dial wheels, belonging to Joel Goodson's father, parked in a suburban Chicago garage like a loaded weapon. What follows is a five-minute chase, a handbrake turn, a dealership scene, and eventually a slow, irreversible roll into Lake Michigan — and the single best line ever handed to a car in a movie, "Porsche. There is no substitute," delivered by a teenager who has just destroyed one.

Porsche did not supply those cars. At least five 928s were used — a 1978 five-speed, a 1979 five-speed and a 1981 automatic among them — and they were sourced from private owners around Chicago and from prop rental houses in Los Angeles. The factory didn't fund it, didn't coordinate it, and collected roughly a decade of free brand equity from it anyway.

What makes the film matter to the 928 specifically, rather than to Porsche generally, is that the car isn't set dressing. It's a character with an arc. It is the thing Joel is forbidden to touch, then the thing he touches, then the thing that goes in the lake, then the thing he has to save — the entire plot exists because the 928 is expensive and precious and not his. Every stake in the movie is denominated in Porsche. You could not have made that film with a Camaro.

And it did something to the car's public meaning that eighteen years of engineering excellence never managed. After 1983, a 928 in a driveway said you have arrived, and you may be in some trouble. That's a better piece of positioning than anything Porsche's own advertising department ever wrote for it — and it cost Stuttgart precisely nothing, because nobody in Stuttgart had anything to do with it.

Part EightThe Stories Owners Tell Each Other

Every car has a fan club. The 928 has something closer to a diaspora — a scattered, stubborn, technically fluent population that has kept a complicated 1970s German grand tourer running for half a century largely by refusing to accept that it can't be done.

It went to Le Mans. Twice. Basically for fun.

In 1983, a French privateer named Raymond Boutinaud entered a lightly modified 928 S in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, in Group B, against six 911 Turbos and a lone BMW M1, in a year when Porsche's factory 956s filled nine of the top ten places. Boutinaud's 928 started dead last. It finished — running but unclassified, some 238 laps behind the winner. He came back in 1984 and finished 22nd.

He was never going to win. That isn't the point. The point is that a man took an essentially stock grand tourer to the hardest race in the world, twice, and both times it was still going at the end.

Porsche raced one, sort of, while pretending it wasn't.

Late in the car's life, Porsche arranged for a 928 GTR Cup car to be run by its longtime partner Max Moritz Racing, entered under the banner of Porsche-Club-Schwaben rather than the factory — because openly campaigning a V8 against its own 911 Cup customers was politically impossible. The driver roster included works pilot Manuel Reuter, a young Bernd Mayländer, and Harm Lagaay, the head of Porsche's design studio, who by all accounts had a marvelous time.

One of them went 234 miles an hour.

Carl Fausett has spent two decades doing things to 928s that Porsche's engineers would find alarming. He ran a supercharged 1978 car up Pikes Peak in 2007, 2008 and 2009, taking third in the Open Division twice. Then he built "The Meg" — named for the megalodon, obviously — with around 1,114 horsepower at the crank and a six-speed with two overdrives. In 2011 he set the 928 record at Bonneville at 216.635 mph. In October 2020, at the Transportation Research Center's oval in Ohio, he ran 234.434 mph.

Two hundred and thirty-four miles an hour. In a car whose basic architecture was signed off during the first oil crisis.

A Beatle owned one, and nobody noticed for nineteen years.

In 2003 a man in Leeds named Raj Sedha bought a 928 S at auction intending to strip it for parts. His wife went through the ownership documents, as one does, and found that between 1980 and 1984 the car had belonged to George Harrison, who had put around 11,000 miles on it. Sedha stopped stripping it and restored it instead, reportedly to the tune of about $125,000. Nineteen years of anonymity, ended by somebody actually reading the paperwork.

And the club is still going, harder than most.

The 928 Owners Club runs a registry with more than 4,100 cars in it and — this is the detail that gets me — a roadside assistance program that is just a list of members willing to help another member who breaks down near them. Frenzy 928 in Sterling, Virginia celebrates its thirtieth year in 2026. Sharktoberfest in Southern California has gathered over a hundred 928s in a parking lot in a single day. There's Rendezvous, and Third Coast in Texas, and Camp 928 in the Northeast. Sharktoberfest has previously drawn Tony Lapine's son Hans, Magnus Walker, and Porsche Classic reps to stand around and talk about a car the factory stopped building three decades ago.

Part NineThe Ghosts of the Four-Door

Porsche knew what the 928 could have grown into. It tried. Twice, in the shadows.

In 1984 the Weissach development center built the 928-4: a 928 S stretched by 25 centimeters, four seats, shooting-brake roofline, projector headlights, green-tinted glass, twenty extra centimeters of rear legroom. In 1987 came the Studie H50 — an S4 stretched again, this time with half-size rear coach doors, a 330-hp V8, and a claimed 168 mph. Porsche put more than 5,000 test miles on it before concluding that a stretched 928 shell simply couldn't be made stiff enough to wear the crest. It sat in the Museum's back rooms for twenty-five years before being wheeled out at Pebble Beach in 2012, at which point everybody looked at it, then looked at the Panamera parked next to it, and went oh.

The H50's real successor was the 989, a proper clean-sheet four-door developed from 1988 under Ulrich Bez and styled by Harm Lagaay. It died in January 1992 when Porsche, in the worst financial shape of its postwar history, could not afford it. Pieces of it survived anyway: the canted headlamps went onto the 993, and the wraparound tail lamps onto the 996.

The four-door Porsche finally arrived in 2009. It was called Panamera, and it sold and sold and sold.

Part TenThe Panamera Problem

Let me be straightforward, because this is the part where enthusiasts usually get dishonest.

The Panamera is a better car than the 928. It is faster, safer, more efficient, more comfortable, more capable, more reliable, better packaged and vastly better resolved. A Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid will do things to a road that a GTS driver could only have hallucinated. It has been a commercial success on a scale the 928 never approached in eighteen years. By every metric a company measures, Porsche got it right the second time.

And nobody has ever put a Panamera poster on a bedroom wall.

That's not a knock on the engineering. It's an observation about what a car is for, beyond its function. The 928 was designed by a man who deliberately made it hard to like, on the theory that the difficulty would be the thing that lasted. He was right. Forty-nine years on, the 928 looks like a proposal from a future that didn't happen. The Panamera looks like a very well-executed answer to a market research brief — which is precisely what it is, and precisely why it works.

Porsche replaced a car nobody bought with a car everybody buys, and somewhere in the exchange it lost the thing that made people love the first one anyway.

The 928 has an X-factor. It's not a measurable quality and I can't defend it with a stopwatch. It's the shark face. It's the headlights standing up. It's the fact that a car this strange got built at all by a company this conservative, and then got made better every year for eighteen years by engineers who apparently never got the memo that it had lost.

Part ElevenStill One of the Greatest Grand Touring Cars Ever Made

Let's be precise about what the GTS actually was, because the easiest mistake to make with this car — and I made it myself for years — is filing it under performance car and grading it on a stopwatch.

It was never that. Porsche never built it to win a track-day argument, and the car tells you so itself: no roll cage, no lightweight panels, no wing anyone could take seriously. What it was built to be was something rarer, and harder to engineer well, than outright speed. It was a symbol. Of luxury that didn't need to raise its voice. Of elegance with real teeth in it. A tour de force on the open road rather than a closed one, and a very specific, very German idea of what wealth and comfort should feel like from behind the wheel — not soft, not indulgent, but composed. The GTS said something about the person driving it that a lap time never could.

That's the case for calling it one of the greatest Grand Touring cars ever built, rather than the greatest anything, full stop — a claim this piece isn't going to make, because claims like that rarely survive contact with the next great GT to come along. What I will argue, and stand behind, is narrower and I think much harder to knock down: for what a Grand Tourer is actually for, almost nothing has ever done the job better.

Here is the argument, laid out plainly.

A great long-distance car needs six things: speed you can use for hours rather than seconds; a ride that doesn't wear you down; seats that are still tolerable at hour eight; enough space for real luggage; the mechanical margin to hold a high cruise without complaint; and a driving position that doesn't leave you folded up at the far end.

The 928 GTS has all six, and it is remarkable how few cars ever have. Modern GTs are quicker but ride on 21-inch wheels and tires with the compliance of a dinner plate. Older GTs are softer but run out of breath at 85. Supercars have no trunk and no manners. Grand touring sedans are grand and touring but not, in the end, an event.

The GTS cruises at three-figure speeds at genuinely low revs, in a cabin that is quiet without being sedated, on a suspension that was tuned by people who had driven the autobahn between Stuttgart and Munich enough times to know what it does to a spine. The transaxle balance means you're not fighting a nose-heavy car through a mountain pass at the end of a long day. The hatch takes the bags. The seats hold up. The V8 will run at 3,500 rpm indefinitely and ask for nothing but fuel.

Los Angeles to Santa Fe. Chicago to the Blue Ridge. Anywhere to anywhere, with somebody you like in the right-hand seat and no particular need to stop. There are faster cars for that trip. There is nothing better at it.

Part TwelveWhat One Costs Now

For about twenty-five years the 928 was the cheapest possible way to own a V8 Porsche, and the market treated it accordingly. That has not been true for a while, and in the last four years it has stopped being true in a way that should embarrass anyone who passed on a clean GTS in 2015.

Here is the shape of it, and then the numbers behind the shape.

Three things drive that spread, and only one of them is the model.

The gearbox is worth more than the year. This is the single most important fact in the 928 market. Hagerty currently puts a #2 (excellent) GTS at around $175,000 — and notes that automatic cars are worth roughly half that. Not ten percent less. Half. In 2022 a 1995 GTS automatic sold on Bring a Trailer for $90,000; two months later a 1995 GTS five-speed with 6,000 fewer miles hammered at RM Sotheby's in Monterey for $406,500, still the record for a 928 that hasn't been in a movie. Two cars, near-identical condition, roughly $315,000 apart, and the entire difference was a third pedal.

Timing-belt paperwork is a load-bearing document. The 928's V8 is an interference engine. A snapped belt doesn't strand you, it destroys the motor. A folder proving the belt and water pump were done, with dates and mileage, is worth more to a buyer than a repaint. Buy the paperwork; the car comes with it.

Cheap 928s are the most expensive 928s. This car shares almost nothing with any other Porsche. Parts are specific, specialists are few, and deferred maintenance compounds quietly for decades. Every 928 owner you will ever meet will tell you the same thing in the same tone of voice: buy the best one you can find and then find a little more money.

The practical advice, if you want one: the S4 is the sweet spot and everybody in the hobby knows it — the modern nose and tail, 32 valves, real brakes, and a price that hasn't yet gone anywhere silly. The GT is the enthusiast's pick and is quietly following the GTS upward. The GTS is a collector car now and is priced like one, and if the automatic doesn't bother you, it is the single biggest bargain in the entire Porsche catalog — the same 345-hp car, half the money, and the only thing you give up is the part where you get to feel superior about it.

And an early car — a plain 4.5-liter 1979 on phone dials, sorted, with a folder — is still under fifty thousand dollars. That is a European Car of the Year winner, a piece of design history, and the exact car Tom Cruise put in a lake, for less than a loaded Camry costs now.

Part ThirteenWhat Happens Next

Two things are happening to the 928 right now, and only one of them involves Porsche.

The first is Nardone Automotive, a French outfit that has done the most sympathetic restomod job on anything in years. Starting from an S4 donor, they strip it and rebuild it with an entirely new carbon-fiber body that keeps every one of Lapine's lines — including the pop-ups, reinterpreted rather than replaced — with subtly flared arches over 18-inch wheels styled after the original 16-inch "manhole" design. Underneath: a reengineered naturally aspirated 5.0-liter V8 developed with Italtecnica making over 450 hp and 385 lb-ft (522 Nm) to 7,400 rpm, running through a bespoke six-speed manual transaxle built inside the original five-speed housing, with a mechanical limited-slip diff. Active suspension, electric power steering, over 3,000 newly designed parts. Interior in Foglizzo leather with Porsche Classic infotainment, because they are not monsters.

Eight launch cars at €480,000 each. It is, by some distance, the most expensive way anyone has ever expressed the opinion that Porsche was wrong in 1995.

The second is what Porsche itself is doing, and it's more interesting than the rumor mill suggests.

Every eighteen months for a decade, a rendering has gone around claiming a 928 revival is imminent — sometimes electric on a Taycan platform, sometimes a Panamera-based V8 coupe. As of now, all of it is speculation. Porsche has confirmed no 928. What Porsche has confirmed, in its September 2025 strategy realignment and everything since, is a substantial retreat from its own electrification timeline: EV launches pushed back, the next-generation EV platform sent back to be redesigned with other VW Group brands, and the product range explicitly to be "supplemented by brand-defining vehicle models with combustion engines." The K1 — the new three-row SUV above the Cayenne, originally planned as an EV — now launches as combustion and plug-in hybrid. Panamera and Cayenne stay available with combustion and PHEV powertrains well into the 2030s, with successor generations added to the cycle plan. The 911 isn't going electric; it's going further into hybrid. The bill for all of this has run into the billions, and Porsche has agreed to cut around 9,000 jobs by 2035.

Read that with 928-tinted glasses and something appears. Porsche has just publicly recommitted to a naturally-aspirated-adjacent, front-engined, V8-and-hybrid future for its big cars, at exactly the moment the market has decided it wants big luxurious two-doors again — see the Aston Martin DB12, the AMG GT, the Bentley Continental. There has never been a better commercial window for a Panamera-based, V8-powered, front-engined Porsche coupe. Whether Porsche builds it, and whether it dares put three specific digits on the back of it, is anybody's guess.

My guess: they won't use the name. The 928 badge carries a story about a car that lost, and Porsche's marketing department has never once in its history volunteered to tell that story.

Part FourteenThe Reverse Flower

Most flowers bloom, then fade, then die. The 928 did it backward.

It arrived strange and unloved, spent most of two decades being quietly, patiently improved by engineers nobody outside the company was applauding, and only truly came into flower right at the end — the GTS, 1992 to 1995, the best version of the car by every measure that matters, arriving just as Porsche was about to stop building it altogether. It got better and better on its way to being discontinued. Then it left, and that is precisely when people started paying attention.

That pattern isn't unique to the 928. It's practically the house style for how the world treats anything genuinely good: ignore it while it's here, then assemble the retrospectives, the appreciation pieces, the seven-figure auction estimates, once it's gone. Somebody builds something extraordinary, the market shrugs, and decades later everyone agrees it was extraordinary all along — as if the applause had been waiting for the exit before it felt safe to start.

That shouldn't be how it works. Brilliance deserves to be recognized while it's still answering the phone, not stitched together in hindsight by people who missed it the first time around. It needs to be seen in the present, not discovered in the past.

And for the people who didn't miss it — the ones who bought a GTS in 1994 knowing exactly what they were getting, the ones who've been driving a phone-dial 928 for thirty years while the rest of the world caught up — there's a better response available than regret. Don't mourn that it's gone. Be glad it was here at all, and that you were paying attention when it was.

The 928 was never going to win at being a 911. It was too heavy, too different, too committed to its own direction to ever be the car it was built to replace. What it won at instead was being exactly, uncompromisingly itself — built for four hundred miles rather than four laps, for the person who wanted to arrive somewhere in comfort having actually enjoyed the getting there. That's a narrower kind of greatness than the 911's. It is not a smaller one.