I must be getting cynical. When I fist saw the Porsche 911 Sally Special, none of my thoughts were positive. And when I saw that the proceeds from its auction would be given to charity, I lamented that this cynical marketing exercise was the best that Porsche could offer to whatever poor charity would be about to receive a harsh lesson in economics.
I’ve rarely been happier about being wrong.
I’m the correct age and target demographic to remember Cars fondly. It’s not like it made me an auto enthusiast, much in the same way that I expect than an interest in design can get you to nolife Animal Crossing rather than the other way around. But when you’re smack dab on the little kid demographic and still young enough to not have the cliches of the plot etched into your brain, it’s an excellent flick. And even though it was Pixar’s least critically acclaimed film at the time, audiences responded in droves.
Someone else was really happy with the film. And that is Disney/Pixar’s accounting department. Critics don’t buy toys but little kids (‘s parents) do, and they bought them in their billions, breaking sales records for licensing merchandise. The less we think about how much oil was used to make now broken and sun-faded plastic Lightning McQueen models the better. And with the…questionable quality of the Cars sequels and unquestionable lack thereof of the Planes Spinoff (people who thought Cars 2 was the point where Pixar sold its soul wanted to be proven wrong, and they were), sales of them remained high.
But it is now $CURRENT_YEAR, and we’re so removed from the movies that most of the kids who watched them now see cars as an inconvenience that gets warm and needs maintenance and is hard to park and they have to replace soon but they can’t because the market has made it so that an oxcart has a $10,000 market adjustment. So naturally I thought Porsche’s one-off for (at the time) an undisclosed charity (in the articles I saw for it) was going to be a disappointment at best.
Not that many people would say no to a 911 Carrera GTS with a 7-Speed Manual transmission. The exclusive shade of blue and 996-homage turbo wheels are also really cool. And things go south from there. Cars badges on the pillars, Cars badges on the tire valves. A “SALLY SPECIAL 001/001” badge greets the passenger and the mode selector wheel on the steering wheel has now been cringe-worthily renamed “KACHOW! MODE”.
I could already see the issues at the RM Sotheby’s auction. Mercifully, I would get to eat my own words. Most of the people who would want something like this are spending their lives on concentrated millennial angst, but some of them aren’t. And as the car took to the floor on August 20 on Monterrey Car week. Some extremely generous soul (who presumably will mothball this as an investment) paid 3.6 million dollars for it.
Proceeds of the auction will be donated to Girls Inc. and USA for the UNHCR refugee agency. Good Job Porsche.
