Welcome to another issue of The Carchive, the internet feature that your average Russian would say was “Более интересным, чем я ожидал”.
We’re popping back to Germany today, rewinding to a time that might now seem very strange to us jaded, dyed-in-the-wool, sceptical nay-sayers.
“We at Porsche are the only German car manufacturer to produce one single type of car- the sports car”
Nope. Can’t compute that at all.


It’s 1980 and the world is a happier, more contented, more innocent place. Or at least it would seem that way if you were in the market for a 2+2 seater V8 powered German sports car. You wanted to know, as a well-heeled chap of taste and distinction, that there was a company out there with your best interests at heart. Or, as Tom Cruise put it; “Porsche, there is no substitute”.
“Our dedication to the Sports Car concept is not diluted by the manufacturer of family saloons, lorries, motorcycles, diesel engines or any other distractions- just cars of a distinctive sporting nature”
Would that be a tacit swipe at Mercedes and BMW, perchance? Well, if so it carefully sidesteps the fact that the 924 was only really adopted by the Stuttgart firm quite a long way into its development, and the 914 had only really been a bastard offspring well before that, but hey. Porsche were exclusively a manufacture of proper Sports Cars. Alright? Good.
No stupid ugly 4x4s or massive overweight sedans here, then.

Whatever the case may have been, Porsche, as ever, were totally impervious to prevailing trends, fashions or movements. They had stubbornly stuck with the engine-out-back layout of the 911 and 356 for years and years, but had to concede that they might be somewhat limiting their market by not moving things forward. Enter the 928, a more conventional machine intended to offer an all-round answer.
They were keen, though, to distance themselves from the Ferraris and Lamborghinis of this world. No, the 928 was to be the intelligent choice.
“Determined by functional logic and perfected in wind tunnel experiments, the 928’s lines deliberately eschew any suggestion of exotic ostentation”
This meant no gaping air intakes, no silly rear wing (er, like the 911 Turbo…), no daft flared wheelarches. A simple, clean sheet design with everything in its right place. Distinctive and distinguished, and absolutely, 100% not influenced at all by the AMC Pacer.
All the way through the text of this brochure it is clear that the 928 was intended as a car to keep hold of, to use day to day. A kind of high-performance personal transport solution. And, in typically Germanic fashion, there was barely an ounce of romanticism to be seen:
“During car washing the smooth, unbroken outer surface gets cleaned all over, including the H4 headlamps in their retracted daytime position”
Well, that’s got to be good news. I daresay a typical Ferrari brochure of the time made barely a mention of the finer points of car cleaning. Mind you, Ferrari folk have a Cleaning Man to do that sort of thing for them.

There were a few more embellishments applied to the pepped-up 928 S version, this enjoyed shallow front and rear spoilers which lowered the drag coefficient to 0.39, which doesn’t really sound all that clever by today’s standards. Fortunately there was 300hp on tap to slide the car through the air, compared to 240hp on the lesser car.
However, they really went wild on the standard equipment of the 928 S, gifting the car with such extravagances as a “parallel link rear window wiper” , even going so far as to fit a “second outside driving mirror on the front passenger side”.

“Where Porsches have the edge on all comparable high-performance cars is in their everyday all-round practicality and load carrying capability”
This was true. Although the rear load deck was at quite a height, the loadspace available was made easy to use. The snug rear bucket seats possessed seatbacks that folded down flat and the trunk was accessed by a glass hatchback. They even considered such niceties as an air compressor which could “also serve to inflate a rubber dinghy or air mattress”.
The massive lump between the rear seats was home to the rear transaxle that lent the 928 so much of its handling prowess, aided and abetted by the Weissach rear axle that passively prevented toe-out on heavy cornering. Quite a swathe of the brochure is dedicated to this feature, dry stuff indeed compared to the usual supercar imagery of tropical sunsets and gloriously deserted highways.

But that was the Porsche way back in 1980. No fripperies, just cars that do what they say. The engineering was there to be seen but now you could choose between the through-a-hedge-backward waywardness of the 911, or now the efficient normalness of the 928.
Or, if you were Tom Cruise and it was 1983 you could be streaking around the outskirts of Chicago trying to shake off Guido the Killer Pimp, the day before taking a mid-term Trigonometry exam. The choice was yours.

I know of several 928s around here rotting in fields and gardens, so they’re obviously not the easiest modern-day ownership proposition and I think I’ll pass for now, much as I love them. But at least I have the brochure.
(Disclaimer:- All images were photographed on the windscreen of my car (no shit!) and are of original manufacturer publicity material. All copyright remains their property)