The Supercar From Stuttgart

It’s 40 years since the 928 first took Porsche into GT territory even beyond the 911, upping the marque’s game in both the performance and prestige stakes.

- Nathan Chadwick

The Porsche 928 was intended to be the car that moved the Stuttgart marque forward, driving up profits with a big, sporting GT that could devour asphalt at high speed along the autobahns and beyond, yet be perfectly usable as an everyday car. Instead of displacing the 911 from the limelight, however, it simply drifted away from it. When production finally ended in 1995, this grand machine fell into expensive used coupé territory and values slumped. Then came widespread neglect – you could pick up tatty but usable S4s for well under five grand not that long ago – but now, approaching its 40th birthday, the 928 is finally starting to move out of the 911’s shadow and forge a path of desirability all of its own. Could this still-futuristic GT be the grandest tourer of them all?

Given the current – and seemingly never ending – cult of 911, it’s hard to imagine that Porsche ever wanted to kill it off. But while any pre-impact bumper 911 is now worth a fortune, sales were cooling off sharply towards the end of the 1960s. Worse still, Porsche saw what Ralph Nader’s book, Unsafe at Any Speed, had done for the Chevrolet Corvair and harboured real concerns that the USA might ban rear-engined cars altogether.

The solution was to move away from an out and-out sports car towards something markedly different. The new car was to have all the power and handling nous of the 911, but in a more usable, stable package.