Do people really think the 914 is ugly? I never thought so. Options

[scottsilvertt]

Do people really think the 914 is ugly? I never thought so.

I have seen far uglier cars...many of them. Even most cars today are not worth a second look.

I remember it coming out as a kid. So many had poor things to say about the 914. My older brother was Chalon crazy. (he liked the car on his own with no outside influences)
Sadly, I listened to friends and the press...and was too young to form my own opinion.

What had people not liking the car?

what's not to like:
the pop up headlights...about as cool as it can get
the trick removable roof.
the two storage spaces
the engine in the middle? who does that, its amazing.
the simple, never out of style interior.
the lightest seats in the world.
the Italian style door handles. flush and wonderful.

I think of it as another little 904.
a good red one looks like a Ferrari to me.
a friend of mine had a gold, low mileage second gen , angled shaped, Dino (from around 1976). yes, it was neat, but I like the 914 better.

I cannot get enough of the car. I'm more fascinated with it more today than any earlier decade.
I mean the car was incredible at Le Mans.

I knew a guy who said he had over 20 of the cars...and could look at them all day.
what an amazing car that was 50 years ahead of its time.
I can't think of a single high production car, in all history that was more unique, and stayed unique for decades.




spending time with an airplane, and what color is this??


4x4 in the mountains of Europe

[bbrock]

You are asking a very biased audience of course, but for me, it was love at first sight. As a kid, my interest in cars was pretty much limited to Hot Wheels and Aurora HO scale slot cars. Of course there were Ford GTs and 917s in the collection but I didn't pay that much attention to what was a Ford, Porsche, or whatever. As for actual cars, corvettes and the Batmobile were cool. Not much else grabbed my attention. Not even the corvairs that my uncle had and I would now love to own. Then one day my mom was driving me to the Schwinn bicycle shop and I spotted the first 914 I can remember seeing. Adriatic blue I believe. I thought it was the coolest car I had ever seen. So different from anything else and somehow made perfect sense on an instinctual level. Luckily, the car had negative side stripes so I knew it was a Porsche. That was the spark and I knew that when I had money to buy my first car, it would be a 914.

Funny that I only started paying attention to 911s after my intro to the 914. I didn't like them at first. They looked too much like a beetle, and beetles were just a cheap car for getting around town while looking awkward at best and making funky engine noises. Of course my taste for beetles and 911s have changed since then. Or maybe I just had no taste back then since I preferred the ugly 914 over the timeless classic shape of a 911. A lot of kids my age thought the same way and that might have something to do with it. A lot of us on the forum are "kids my age" and maybe there is something about being introduced to a car way ahead of its time at an age when we were receptive to such things.

I'm with OP on most modern cars. I think we are in a dark age of car styling. I'm so sick of the "angry birds" styling of modern cars. Not a fan of the pastel clay colors for paint either. Trendy rather than timeless. Then the ID.Buzz appears and I have hope. Nice to see a car smiling again.