The secondhand market for Porsche’s specialty GT cars is insane. We’ve reported on 911 Rs selling for three or four times their original sticker price. Porsche’s not taking this lying down, and so the automaker says it will start getting tough on car flippers to ensure their sports cars are sold to people that will actually drive them.
In a recent interview with Car and Driver, Porsche GT boss Andreas Preuninger made it very clear that he is not happy that many of his best cars are snapped up by speculators and car flippers just to make a profit:
I personally like to see my cars being used. That’s what we build them for. They are just too good to be left to stand and collect dust…I don’t like this business of people buying our cars to make money on them. That was never our intention.
The purpose of limiting a car is not for it to gain value. We don’t want to be laying money on each car’s roof when they run out of the factory.
Preuninger even took a shot at 911 R “collectors” who were pissed that Porsche decided to offer a manual transmission in the all-new GT3 because they felt it would reduce the value of their 911 R. He told them that Porsche is an automaker, not a “hedge fund.”
Preuninger also said he believes that if there is a demand for a manual GT3, then that’s a car they should build so people can enjoy it.
Supply and demand will always mean that people are going to buy rare cars and sell them for profit. There’s nothing illegal or essentially wrong about that. But it’s easy to see where Porsche feels like this screws with their brand image, and perhaps more importantly for them, how flipping cars at insane prices upsets the market for all of them.
So what’s Porsche’s plan here? Basically, it comes down to “we know who you are.” From the story:
We are monitoring very closely who is flipping cars,” he said. “We do not build too many cars and we know most of our customers well — we like to have a name for every car before we build it.
It seems reasonable to believe that serial car-flippers simply won’t have Porsches sold to them anymore, then.
When there’s hundreds of thousands of dollars to be made flipping rare Porsches, I don’t know how much of an impact this plan can have on the second and market. I would also be curious to see if Porsche’s willing to crack down on their own dealers who put massive markups on GT cars that are in demand.
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