69-73 Longhoods: 64,983; 12,996/year

84-88 Carreras: 73,912; 14,782/year

Neither of those is a lot of cars considering Honda makes 1 million hybrids a year.

That is 13.7% more Carreras than Long hoods.

Of course, it discounts the scrapped -- and worse, the conversion to impact bumper look-alikes!

No doubt significantly fewer Long Hoods survive, but plenty of Carreras have been junked and balled-up on the track -- and the original point, there are not many comparables.

I had to LOL, COLB.

It's nice to be able to respond with solid STFU posts citing evidence when someone calls bull****.

Keep LOLing. Everyone loves a moron. :)

As for sales numbers, the source you posted is total 911 production/sales worldwide for each year. I was thinking 911 sales in the U.S.A., more germane to this discussion of people looking for used cars in the U.S.

Porsche sold 30k+ units in North America alone in 1986. That includes 944s and 928s plus a smattering of 924s, so the 17k 911 production figure for that year is accurate. In the 1960s and early '70s, Porsche sold a much higher percentage of their cars in Europe and other markets compared to the U.S.

By the early 1980s, Porsche sold half the cars they built in Southern California alone! :eek:

That is not including the ones they sold in Northern California!! How many of those longhood 911s sold in Germany and the U.K. do you think survived the 10 year mark before they broke in half from rust?? Why do you think that every single early 911 sold in CA. in the last 15 years has wound up on a boat crossing the Atlantic, you genius? :cool:

The supply of 3.2 Carreras available for sale or being driven in the U.S. dwarfs the number of early 911s left, and I also stand by my statement that they sold a hell of a lot more of them. Or should I say, we sold a lot more of them, since I was in the dealer organization in those days.

Take a gander at Porsche's own numbers of NA sales comparing 3.2 Carrera years and 964/993 years. This chart only goes back to 1986:

Sales Statistics: Porsche Cars North America

Finding a used 3.2 Carrera is a piece of cake. The prices have just gone up a little. Try finding an owner selling a '67-'73 911S in the U.S. right now. Lot's o' luck. :rolleyes:

I've always heard the other way around, that late 60's early 70's America kept Porsche in business.i guess a quick review of the Redbook could confirm or deny that.

Interesting to see the tank in sales after the '87 crash.

Um, those are production numbers, and they started producing those cars Summer of '87.

While your statement may be correct for existing vehicles in the US, your original statement didn't say so.

I'm sorry - I clearly didn't realize your knowledge of US Porsche sales numbers makes you the judge.

And let's not forget 'my' model year, 1989 - from August '88 to July '89. Redbook lists total US sales of 3377.

Maybe, but even if the ratio of Carreras sold in the US is greater than the ratio of long hoods, those ratios have not stayed constant over time.

As cars become more expensive (a combination of supply and demand) a certain car model becomes, their sales markets become increasingly global.

As you mention later -- there has been a mass migration of cars between the continents, and I expect it has gone both ways at different times. Gray market cars exploded in the late 70s and early 80s partially because the Mark rate was about 3 or 4 to 1. How many long hoods made the same trip? And the balance has gone the other way the past few years. I have no doubt there are substantially more Carreras in the U.S. today than long hoods -- no one disputed that. But "more" than a small number does not equate to "a lot" -- Carreras remain rare cars in the overall market. It is not orders of magnitude "more".

Your NA sales figures just confuse the issue since they don't separate 911 from 944 and 928. Where I live clapped out 944s are two-a-penny. Air-cooled cars of any vintage are not.

On the second point -- as mentioned earlier -- the migration of all Porsches in the 1970s and 1980s was to America, and not away from it.

Well, the market for 3.2 Carreras also "dwarfs" the market for long hoods -- and so long as buyers outnumber sellers, prices wil continue to rise.

Which gets to the basic fact that neither generation was sold in big numbers. That was the whole point. The number of surviving 911s for sale in any given year probably numbers in the thousands, maybe dipping into the hundreds for the SWB years, and around 10k for the highest production years.

This is useless information since it only shows one side of the equation, and includes all models. Not sure why you posted it.

Nice apples to oranges comparison. S Models were a fraction of total production. Of course they are more rare. But there are still dozens for sale at any given second if you are willing to pay the money. Try to find a Club Sport or Speedster - or even a M491. They are there, but they are few, and expensive.

Finding a used longhood is a piece of cake, too. Just because they are expensive, rusty, or molested doesn't mean they are unavailable in the market.

The inventory of used 3.2 Carreras must have changed drastically when I wasn't looking to become what you are describing. Good, low-mileage cars have always been plentiful since they were sold new.

Porsche 911 sales numbers have always been low compared to Toyotas or Fords, but they are huge compared to other, more exotic sports cars. They are relatively plentiful and not rare in the least. Even early 911S cars are not the least bit rare, they are just rare in the marketplace now compared to buyers seeking one. I think that we are in basic agreement with this.

The official sales figures I found from Porsche was the link I posted, only going back to 1986 and not breaking down by model, ie. 911/944/928. But you can rest assured that the breakdown of 911s to other models remained pretty constant in the years after the 3.2, if anything there were more 911s compared to other models. Nothing sold in the early '90s.

1986 was a record-smashing year and the next couple were similar. Porsche was cranking out the 911s as fast as they could build them and adding variants such as turbo cabriolet, slantnose cars and factory widebodies.

And no one ever grey-marketed a longhood into the USA from Europe in the '70s or '80s. They were plentiful, cheap and not all that in demand here in the U.S. plus there was no performance increase in different markets like there was with SCs and Carreras. Or should I say, I never saw it and I was balls-deep in the used 911 market in those days in the biggest market in the world.

If we restrict the discussion to first and second rate cars, you are 100% incorrect. Of course there are rusty/molested/POS longhoods for sale. That's what's left. Porsches used to be owned largely by fanatical owners who treated them better than their wives and children. :cool:

I guess it's just a fluke that of the six longhoods I've owned 2 were European imports.

Were they '73 Carrera RSes? Those were all grey-marketed in. Other than the occasional '68 911S, I've never seen another or at least been aware that the car I was looking at was sold originally in other markets.

So yes, might be a fluke.

I had a '65 RHD 912 and a '68 911T. The '68 was a serviceman stationed in Germany who took Euro delivery. Based on the articles in Excellence that seems to be somewhat common.

Servicemen buying cars in Europe and bringing them home count as grey market for sure. You are correct that that was fairly common, (not just Porsches, of course).

European delivery or "tourist delivery" for North American customers was always popular as well but those cars do not count as anything other than regular USA sales picked-up at the factory. It's the car they would have picked-up at the home dealer.

I sold a few tourist delivery cars back in the day. The price use to pay for a moderate vacation in Europe. I also knew plenty of guys who just went over and bought ROW cars and greyed them in.

The inventory is less relevant than the number of people interested in buying them, and having the cash to do so. And yeah, I'd say that has changed in major ways in the last 18 months. And that means there is a relatively smaller inventory to go around than 2-3 years ago. I doubt you would disagree with that.

BTW -- I think someone mentioned in another post that there are around 35 Carreras for sale on Autotrader, nationwide. There are around 17 non-turbos on Ebay (many of them molested.) Maybe a dozen here on Pelican. These cars are in demand.

I said this in my first post. If your point of comparison is Ferrari or Lamborghini, Porsches are common. Exclude those two marques, and boutique cars and you are left with....what? What is comparable? A Lotus? pre-DeTomaso Maseratis? E-Types?

Air-cooled Porsches are the sweet spot between exotics are mass-produced cars. Rare enough to be interesting and desirable, but enough built to be accessible to people of average means.

Despite your statement to the contrary, 14-17k cars a year does not make a model "plentiful" unless no one is interested in buying them, and that is clearly not the case. That is why prices for run of the mill 3.2 cars are up ~40-50% in 18 months.

We do agree on the principle. I just think it applies to Carreras as well.

Matt Monsen already addressed this. I don't know how many cars servicemen brought back from Europe. But it was a lot -- and it wasn't just factory tourist deliveries. Air Force guys probably brought back most of the 50s and 60s Alfas and Lancias that made it over here. I expect something similar applies to 50s and 60s Porsches and BMWs, before the 1974 regulations made it hard. It would be an interesting thing to look into. Seems like most of the pre-74 imports on BAT claim serviceman import provenance.

There were somewhere around 250k soldiers in Germany every year throughout the 60s and 70s. Mainly young men with disposable income in dollars trading at extremely favorable exchange rates.

BTW -- this just occurred to me.

If you make a total swag, and guess that maybe a third of 69-73 long hoods produced avoided getting scrapped, that is around 21k cars.

If you guess maybe 60% of Carreras, that is 44,000. But I bet the inventory numbers are slowly converging by 300-500 cars a year.

I would bet that the number of long hoods actually driving or for sale has gone up significantly in the past 5 years, as they have become valuable enough to pull from the garage, barn, or field and restore. Even the maltreated 80s conversions are for sale all over. Meanwhile, they are so expensive they are decreasingly driven -- and therefore wrecked much less frequently, and generally repaired when they are.

The number of intact Carreras, on the other hand, is still declining. Almost no one is actually restoring these cars -- because it is still cheaper to buy a better one than to do a legit restoration of a clapped out car. Once they are seriously damaged, rusted, or severely ill-used, they are parted out, or converted to track cars and eventually balled up and scrapped.

There is an inflection point, though, where there will be few enough around, and the good ones expensive enough -- that it will become economical to restore them.

I had a guy do a walk around of my car at Jack-in-the-box last week. Then he walked back to his Lexus and sat on the passenger side with his feet out. When I went out to my car, he walked over to me, said I had a nice car and asked me if I work on them. Gave me his number and asked me if I could work on his 78 that he hasn't driven in 3 years. I might actually hit him up and go see his car.