The Strange Porsche you never knew existed

Have you ever wondered why cars went from looking like this to this in a matter of years? How did Lamborghini go from this to this? Why did sports cars start to look like big pieces of cheese? What if I told you that the company best known for constantly manufacturing curves? cars throughout history, the most unlikely culprit is actually something responsible for this move towards angularly designed sports cars, that's right, blame it on Porsche, well, just for reference. I've linked the sources for this video in the description, with the main one being this article on the history of the tapir, check it out if you're interested in diving in for yourself.

I have also linked a free ebook that is really amazing written by Guy Durkin and Jeffrey Hacker on the subject of wedge cars and their origins and that is a really good resource like Okay, now the idea and execution of the wedge car actually dates back to before the cars we're talking about today, like all great car designs, it begins with a prophecy that dates back long before any triangular wedge-shaped car came out and I'm not kidding in a 1957 article about rodent tracks titled Driving the Wedge or after 1960, what's not to love about that title? In that article, Strawther McMahon details the history up to that point of cars and often racing cars using what he called a wedge-shaped front end. end, whether vertical or horizontal, and this was mainly used for better aerodynamics and this idea dates back to the early days of motorsport, despite being reserved mainly for competition, this notion was already beginning to enter the design of regular vehicles, but only with serious prominence in the actual concept. cars that came mainly from Italy and these were not full wedge cars.

MCM notes that concept cars are generally a sign of where manufacturers are headed and that's how he ends his article, however, he can rest assured that when the last vestige of carriage tradition is gone. and its provisional son, the motorized calop, have finally vanished. They will finally make their way on the pulse-guided highways with multi-level supersonar of the future and it may not be far away, so mcmin believes that in the future we will be blazing our way . through what will be these futuristic roads and while the ultimate future of sports car design may not have remained this way, the wedge certainly fast forward about 10 years and we see what many, including the authors of that e-book, considered like the first one really.

Complete version of a wedge-shaped car, although it's hard to say which one is the first because it evolved. The 1966 Canera is a very good candidate designed by Ray Canera in his third year of college for his studies at Art Center College. design team in Los Angeles, this is a car that was way ahead of its time, as the 1960s came to a close, the idea of ​​the front end of the sports car being shaped like a wedge was starting to take hold among many designers. , especially in Italy not only for aesthetic reasons, as we saw in the mcm article, it is also about performance and aerodynamics.

Perhaps the most influential early wedge car was the 1968 Alpha Romeo Kabo, designed by Marcelo Gandini working for the Beron studio. Don't correct me on any of them. These names, guys, I know I'm probably not getting any of them right. This car would really set the stage for later wedge cars that would come into existence, such as the Kunos, which was also designed by Gandini, but how does Porsche fit into all this? I mean, once we got to the end of the '60s, Porsche wasn't just busy selling 911s, what could they have to do with this new, rather Italian trend, while Porsche had already started experimenting with deviations from its proven formula and true at this point?

Volkswagen Porsche's collaborative 914 was in the works. Not only was that car not very Porsche in terms of performance, but it also didn't really follow Porsche's design language. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Porsche 917 race car showed radical signs of, shall we say. wedg, so it's not entirely surprising that

porsche

and volkswagen decided to partner with the newly created design studio ital design and its founder giorgetto gugo to create a new type of car. Their goal was to try to build a car entirely dedicated to the new wedge design. a design concept in itself, not primarily as a performance experiment to see what people would think of this new trend.

Now the idea that this new design for this car was essentially form over function is pretty clear because it wasn't built on the 9911. No, it was built on that new Volkswagen Porsche collaboration. The 914 isn't exactly a supercar, as you know, the most recent wedge designs had been the 914, it was like a low-end Porsche, but a high-end Volkswagen, if that makes sense, and it was an attempt to really just . creating cash flow for both companies, a specific version of the 914 would lay the foundation for this radical new car, although it was sold only as a Porsche here in the states, the 914 was primarily a Volkswagen powered by the company's 4-cylinder adcv engine , but when Porsche decided to make the 914/6 powered by the flat-6 directly from the 911, then it seems that the foundation for this new car was laid.

It was something like a mid-engined 9911 in hopes of making a totally futuristic car. AAL designer giorgetto giugo decided to go with the full wedge and went to Volkswagen hoping to use this car for that purpose. Now the main goals with the Tapiro were aerodynamic safety and really just a fully realized version of The Wedge concept, this meant a completely flat long bonnet. surfaces throughout the car and everything came to a point at the front angles where cars previously had curves and also large glass panels all around for amazing visibility. It also had revolving doors and, surprisingly, unlike so many prototypes that are essentially just shells, this was a fully functional car, almost completely production-ready, of course they would have to add mirrors, but you know, that's common, the ones Rear glass panels are also raised as are the doors exposing the engine and doors open and the rear hood hinge. a steel transverse structure that runs the long WS the length of the car and also functions as a rollar, so this was a very interesting thing, especially for the late 60s, now there is actually a bit of mystery surrounding the car , specifically to the engine, what I said about the 914/6.

Being the basis of this car, that's actually something debated, we know that the Tapir was powered by an engine, it wasn't just an empty hunk of metal and we'll see why later and we know it was a six-cylinder engine. but we do not know for sure if it was actually powered by the Flat 6 of the Porsche 9146. Reason would tell us that the Tapir in its first presentation in 1970 should have come with the normal 4-cylinder engine of the 914, like that one. The 6-cylinder 914 special had not yet entered production, but we know from sources that it didn't have a 4-cylinder engine, it had a six, so what six?

It's possible that the car came with a completely different version of the 911. The Flat 6, not the one made later for the 914, is a bit of a mystery and some of it was lost to history for reasons we'll see soon, but yes , it is very interesting now that this new concept car called The tapiro was first presented in 1970 at the Turin Motor Show. This would be the start of a tour for the car around the world, even heading to major US shows in 1971 and hopes were high that this radical looking car could make it to production as a Porsche, but would it be the bold company? enough to make a car like this for everyday people, a car that completely abandoned all of its design language, how much it would cost, and whether this would be the future of car design.

There was a problem, although remember that 914, the car that was the tapira. essentially built and remember how Porsche and Volkswagen decided to make a six cylinder version using the 911's boxer engine, making the 914 a sort of mid-engined 9911, yeah that car wasn't well received, very few enthusiasts sold it, they just wanted to. a 911 if they were going to spend that kind of money, so Porsche was afraid to bring the Tapiro to production. You know, if enthusiasts didn't want the 914/6, would they really want this kind of weird, crazy version of that car? It was clear that the Tapir was not going to be the future for Porsche, so it continued to circulate as a concept car and as a kind of symbol of this new type of design, a style that other companies would adopt and apply to their full extent. , the final stop of his tour would be in 1973 at the Barcelona fair in Spain, there a Spanish businessman would buy the only Tapiro that

existed

and after using the car as his daily driver, this is how we know that it had an engine of the shape in which the car would find its way into the hands of famous Argentinian composer Waldo de los Ríos here the tapir would experience a sad demise see the Porsche 914/6 on which this car was essentially based was known to catch fire mainly due to floatation failure in the carbohydrates triples and that is exactly what would happen to the tapir although there are all kinds of stories about how he ended up in Catching Fire, many of them political and have to do with the conflicts that exist in Spain but this is really what happened and that happened while Waldo drove the car in 77, after Waldo's death his wife took the car and stored it behind their house and there it sat abandoned for decades along with the rest of the property, but somehow the

strange

little wedge survived found by a collector in the 1990s and in the end a design, that is the studio that designed the tapir, they were able to recover the car and now it lies in their studio unrestored, they simply left it in its sad burned state, now a design of towel would end up being one of the most important design studios in automotive history, so it's not that everything was altered, it's not that this is the only car they would end up designing, but imagine putting your heart and soul into the design a radical new car, a car you believe in. could and maybe should and also in a weirdly roundabout way it would be the future and then that car

never

goes into production but other cars that look very similar do and then someone gets the car and it just gets lost in the story and then you get 25 years later and you meet Ed with that one car and your son is standing next to you and it's burned into focus.

This photo may be one of the most poetic in automotive history, the reunion of the toasted bachelor. Porsche tapir with its original designers imagine what that must have felt like imagine now you are reunited with your high school car decades later and it is essentially destroyed and now imagine if that was not only the first car you drove but you also created that car you designed it and made it happen it's a pretty amazing story changes in automotive design often follow cultural changes the emergence of wedge-shaped cars and simply more angular vehicles compared to what we saw in the 50s and 60s represented a change in the world as a whole, whether cultural or political, but wedge-shaped cars and completely committed angular designs would essentially have their day, but if they disappeared completely, the concept has actually made a comeback, you guessed it with the truck Tesla cyber.

I hope it just says Cyber ​​Tesla. The truck in my video just makes this video start trending and despite this long history of wedge cars, the introduction of the Cyber ​​Truck was apparently as shocking to the world as a car like this, or you know , the Lamborghini Kosh, maybe the Tesla Fanboys are not. For students of automotive history, there's really nothing radical here in terms of overall design, if anything it's retro, not futuristic, it's what people thought the future would be like 60 years ago, but is it the future today? ? Could the wedge shape return to automotive? designs and maybe this is the time for Porsche to bring back the tapir yes, I doubt it