No Fixed Abode: Singer Song of Sixpence

Jack Baruth
by Jack Baruth

A few years ago, I wrote an opinion piece about Porsche vandal tuner RWB and the ethical aspects of damaging historically valuable air-cooled 911s. Some of you agreed, some of you disagreed, some of you took it very personally.

This past week the article gained some traction again via a wave of FB shares, which happens often enough that the RWB article is in the all-time top 25 most popular TTAC posts. This time, however, a few of the B&B had a new question to ask: What do you think about the “Porsche 911 Re-Imagined By Singer”?

Good question. As you’d suspect, I have an opinion on the subject. But the most fascinating thing about the Singer cars isn’t what they say about the company or its approach to rebuilding air-cooled Porsches; it’s what the Singer phenomenon says about Porsche itself.

If you don’t know what a Singer Porsche is then look at the Internet. If you don’t have the Internet but instead are one of the truly devout Jack Baruth fans who pay to have everything I write transcribed by monks onto foolscap and carried via mule or pigeon to your mountain retreat or private island, I’ll give you a brief description. Singer is a company that takes 964-generation Porsche 911s and rebuilds them to look like classic “longhood” 911s from the pre-impact-bumper era of 1965-1973. This, in and of itself, is not a new or unique idea. There were shops in the UK doing it a decade ago — although at the time it was the humble 911SC that most often came in for the cod-vintage treatment.

Singer’s innovations in this field are twofold. To begin with, they make most of the interior and exterior parts themselves, often to a standard that far exceeds that of the original. Singers are chock-full of CNC-machined vents and buttery leather and bespoke-woven cloth and billet-aluminum knobs and the like. No Porsche ever left the factory with this level of tactile and visual appeal. The second, and equally important, innovation was in the realm of pricing. Most of the fake-longhood cars from the UK cost less than a new 911, often significantly so, but a Singer costs anywhere from a quarter-million to half a million dollars. If you think that such a pricing strategy inclines Singer’s customers to take even more pride and pleasure in the company’s fastidious workmanship and unique componentry, then pat yourself on the back for understanding human psychology.

In this Instagram-driven era, Singer has acquired quite a bit of name recognition simply because the cars photograph so well. The company has also made a remarkable effort reaching out to the business and lifestyle press with drive opportunities. (Not to include TTAC, alas.) Most “car people” know all about Singer by now. There’s now a book on the Singer “philosophy”, priced at a brand-appropriate eighty-five bucks and written by well-liked press-release-word-rearranger Michael Harley, for all the people who would like to own one of the cars but have no clear plan to put their hands on $300,000 in the foreseeable future.

So that’s what Singer is. What do I think about the company? Well… I’ll start with this. I think the cars are stunning. There’s no way in hell I would ever buy one; given $300K in liquid cash I’d buy a Viper ACR and spend the rest of the money on a season with a Grand-Am Continental series team. However, I have a particular bias for action that I don’t expect everyone to share and which doesn’t extend to my entire life. I’ve deliberately chosen to own four PRS Private Stock guitars instead of quitting my job and touring the country in a van playing my original music at coffeehouses on a $200 plywood Yamaha acoustic. I have no contempt or even disapproval for Singer’s customers. The cars are stunning objects that, to a large degree, speak for themselves with the excellence of their execution.

How does Singer differ from RWB? Well, Singer starts with normally aspirated 964 coupe and Targa shells. There are about 40,000 of those in the world, and many of them are thrashed beyond usability. By contrast, Brian Scotto’s RWB fender-flaring started with a pristine 965 Turbo, of which there are probably two thousand left. To me, there’s a big difference between rescuing relatively common cars that would otherwise be destined for junkyards and taking a welding torch to a pristine Turbo. That matters more than the precise nature of the “restoration” or “upgrades” performed.

I’ve said it before, but I will say it again: air-cooled Porsches in original specification are starting to become rare enough to be worth preserving whenever possible. I grew up surrounded by 2.7-liter cars and 911SCs with crumpled bumpers, but that was thirty years ago and here in the Midwest it’s not uncommon for me to go a week or two between sightings of an proper 911, particularly in the cold months. If we want the next generation to have any chance of experiencing these very special automobiles properly, it is up to each one of us to look after the cars we have left.

The Singer cars, ironically, would be much harder to bring back to original spec than anything “Nakata-san” has ever done. You can rip a bodykit off and restore the galvanized shell of a 911 in the space of a week, without the use of a rotisserie. Un-Singer-izing a 964 will pose a much stronger challenge, particularly given the fact that interior parts for those cars are already hard to find. Some Singer customers are giving the company their own solid-condition 964s for modification; I hope the original parts are either retained or sold onto the market for people who are interested in maintaining their cars to factory spec.

Still, the bottom line is that there is a genuine ethical difference between resurrecting relatively common naturally aspirated 911s from the least-loved era of the vehicle and tack-welding Turbos. You might not agree, but I have two Porsches in my garage and you don’t so my opinion counts more than yours in this matter. Sorry about that. I wouldn’t let RWB touch my 993 and I hope that most of my fellow owners feel the same way. If, on the other hand, I had a 200k-mile 964 sitting around and some IPO money burning a hole in my pocket, I wouldn’t have any moral qualms about sending the car for the full-woven-linen-door-card treatment.

To sum up, therefore, I don’t get agitated about Singer the way I do about RWB. My friends at Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG, however, should be more than a little concerned, because the fundamental core of Singer’s appeal, the conceit that underpins the entire enterprise, is this: Even a facsimile of a normal everyday Porsche 911 from 1969 is vastly more desirable and valuable than a modern top-of-the-line, 500-plus-horsepower, PDK-and-wings-and-flared-fenders GT3RS. Listen. We’ve all accepted the idea that some vintage cars have tremendous value. When you see how much a Ferrari 250 GTO goes for at auction, it simply reinforces the notion that the GTO was a very special automobile. The same is true for Corvette Grand Sports and legitimate Cobras and various COPO Chevrolets and the like.

Now ask yourself how much you would pay for a Singer-ized 1977 Accord, or indeed for a 1977 Accord of any condition. Is the answer “Four times the MSRP of a new Accord V6”? Of course not. While the ’77 Accord was a great car and I still fondly remember the few times I drove one back in the Eighties, the current Accord is indisputably superior in virtually every category. The same is true for nearly any car you can imagine. Do you think a well-restored ’69 Mustang is worth four times as much as a new GT350R, assuming it doesn’t have the Shelby logo on the side and a big-block under the hood?

The Singer Porsches aren’t 1973 Carrera RS replicas. They’re simply 964s that look like old cars. The idea that such a thing is worth vastly more than any new-production 911 speaks to one uncomfortable fact: the cars built by Porsche before the water-cooled/SUV/Tiptronic/AWD-cabriolet era are considered by the cognoscenti to be indisputably superior to the current lineup. There are people who would rather have one old 964 than three new GT3RSes. Were I in charge of Porsche, that fact would keep me up at night.

It’s reasonable to point out that Singer’s total sales volume wouldn’t keep a single rural Porsche dealership busy and that plenty of people still want new cars like the Cayman GT4. It’s still worrisome. The good news is that Porsche could fix the problem, were they inclined. If you think that some dudes in a shed with a CNC machine can do anything that Porsche itself cannot, you’re kidding yourself. The only thing keeping the mother company from turning out a 911 that puts Singer to shame is the fact that the current platforms are a bit wide-body, a bit anodyne. But that’s not a permanent situation. Give me a car that has the spirit and the proportions and the visual appeal of the old 911s, but make it fast and emissions-legal. I’ll take out my wallet for that one. At the very least, such a car would give Singer something to do forty years from now, right? ‘Cause somehow I can’t see a “Porsche Macan S Re-Imagined By Singer” moving anybody’s needle, least of all mine.

[Photo credit: Singer Vehicle Design]

Jack Baruth
Jack Baruth

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  • Flipper35 Flipper35 on Nov 13, 2015

    You might not agree, but I have two Porsches in my garage and you don’t so my opinion counts more than yours in this matter I may not have two, but the one I do have is a long hood. Also, I mostly agree with what you wrote.

  • Outback_ute Outback_ute on Nov 13, 2015

    Interesting discussion. The comparison with Icons or Eagle E-types is spot on, to a lesser extent you might also compare them to high-end Eleanor Mustangs which would cost multiples of a modern GT. I don't think Porsche will be threatened by their own back catalogue. I do wonder if Porsche has considered setting up a factory resto-shop as Aston Martin has, it would be worth it for the image-building similar to the race team to enhance the purity of the brand in the face of the SUV predominance. You could argue that RWB cars help Porsche preservation overall by increasing the interest in the cars (by more than the number of people who will go on to build their own RWB). Not to mention that Porsches have always been modified and the 993 is going through the phase before it is widely appreciated as a classic outside of the Porsche faithful, and I would bet we will see RWB Turbos converted back to stock in 20 years time. All cars go through the same cycle, it is nothing new. Ferrari 330 GTCs used to get cut up into GTO replicas which nobody would dream of doing now. As a final question, is it wrong for someone to put flares on a long-hood era 911 too?

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
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