My 928 is almost 35 years old (build date February 1986!). by 1986 it had fabulous abs brakes & a 5 liter 288hp engine. It is fast, comfortable, curvey and low. With the 5 speed in the rear, weight balance is excellent, even under throttle in the rain. The interior & leather still look good, and visibilty is decent for such a low car. Compared to the behemoths on the road today, it looks small, but I remember in the '80s it looked larger than a lot of cars. It’ll take 4 people to dinner (once that’s safe again) if the trip is short, chew through miles of American highway at absurd speeds, hold enough luggage for a camping trip, and occasionally turn in 25mpg.
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Any reason why BoingBoing has chosen to advertise this particular 928?
And, AND, a little fettling (well, quite a lot of fettling), and you can put a Fiat Uno Turbo engine in there, which is clearly a brilliant idea…
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I’m wondering if GM’s electric crate motor could be shoehorned into an X-1/9. That would be downright insane - 200 HP in a car that small and light would be pretty crazy.
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Under $10k? You used to get these for under $3k all day long. Why? Because literally nobody can keep them running for long unfortunately. You may as well buy a Maserati Merak if you want cool driveway art for cheap. I was once offered two of them for free and had to pass because time is the most valuable resource we have here.
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When we were kids, one of my neighbors had a go-kart. One day, he invited me drive the thing in the gravel parking lot at the nearby school.
Before that day, I had no idea that it was possible to flip a go-kart…
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The Porsche 968 was a great amalgamation of the 928, 924 and 944. All the fun of a front engine, rear drive setup with the simple elegant esthetics of Porsche Design. This one is a bargain!
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I replaced the stereo system in a 928 S4 some time around 1990, and I think the car was probably an ’88. I got to drive it around town a bit afterward. My take on it was that it was Porsche’s answer to the Corvette: that absolute land yacht of a chassis would quite literally twist when you revved the engine. I don’t mean in gear, foot on the brake, anything like that. Just fire it up, leave it in P (sigh) and blip it. The damn thing visibly twists, all three tons or whatever.
But on the inside, nothing but cozy creature comfort once you finished falling into the thing. Everything about it was three feet thick and covered in leather, fleece, or somehow both. Once you closed the driver’s side door (which weighed almost as much as the Audi I drove at the time), you were as snug as a bug in a cast iron rug.
I turned right out of the parking lot, onto Ward Avenue in Honolulu. As I was ambling up towards King Street, I heard some kind of huge muscle car somewhere near me in traffic. I looked around in all my mirrors, and didn’t find anything that would account for the epic growl I was hearing. And that, of course, was when I realized two things simultaneously: the source of the growl, and that I was moving through afternoon traffic at approximately twice the speed limit.
Twenty years later when I finally got to drive a V12 Mercedes, I didn’t let it trick me that way. (Or at least, I tried not to.)
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What you are missing is the 924S
A 924 bodyshell with a derated 944 engine
fun to drive and cheap to buy because 924 The S made an s-load of difference
Harsh, but fair. I loved my MR-2 on twisty roads, though. I had one in New Zealand. Due to its recent volcanic pedigree, New Zealand is very lumpy and almost every road is twisty. In amongst it, that car was nothing but fun.
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The MR-2 was a typical Toyota - it was functionally designed, reliable and performed decently. It just needed to have better styling.
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I recall reading an article comparing the X1-9 to the MR2. The running joke was that every time they stopped to swap drivers, more bits had fallen off the Fiat.-
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