‘Road/Show’ Explains How the Porsche 911 Earned its Name
It’s a video dictionary of many things Porsche 911.
We like to we know a lot about Porsche and the 911. So consider us pleasantly surprised to find out the reason our favorite automotive Icon wears the badge “911” is because of the French. Road/Show dropped a wonderful little history video to explain. It all started because Porsche is one of the most stereotypical German companies in existence, following the ethos that everything can be engineered, quantified, and perfected. In that vein, basically every item Porsche created was named by a three digit code that signified when it was created, all in chronological order. That is why Porsche’s first car was called the 356.
Back when Porsche was preparing to launch the 911, it was called the 901. This is where the French come in to throw a crusty baguette into Porsche’s plans. The automaker Peugeot already builds cars with three digit name codes, all with zeros as the middle signifier. To prevent any major fights and complications with international copyright laws, Porsche needed to make a change.
Unfortunately Porsche had already begun stamping out pieces for production, including name badges. This is where that German nature stepped back in to save the day with efficiency. Porsche can’t name the car “901” but they already have huge buckets of metal numbers for badging. So they just dropped the zero, stamped out even more ones, and voila the 911 was born.
The video continues on from there to explain all the variations of the Porsche 911 naming conventions. We know you don’t need someone to explain the difference between an S and a GTS. We also know that you have people in your life who are curious about cars, but find things like the 911 model range to be undecipherable. For those folks, just send them the link to this video and tell them to jump over to the three minute mark. It doesn’t cover the full breadth of every 911 that exists, but it is a good baseline for them to work from. And it saves you the effort of explaining it for the 900th time. That sounds like a solid win-win in our book.
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