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Weekly Motor Fix: air-cooled madness

4 April, 2016

I’m not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, to make a song and dance about the price of air-cooled Turbo Porsches, but something extraordinary has just happened.

Yesterday, I searched 911 Turbos for sale in New Zealand by highest price. Sitting atop this list was a very tidy-looking 1997 993 911 Turbo listed earlier that day — for $299,990.

Yep, $300,000 for a 19-year-old car. Next car down, for the same price, was a 2013 991 Turbo S. Faster, newer, and, quite simply, better.

I logged back on this morning just to make sure my eyes didn’t deceive me, but the car was gone — no longer listed. Maybe I’d dreamt that the asking price of these fabled air-cooled Porshes had popped up to this simply ridiculous level? Luckily, I’d taken a screenshot of the listing to post on Facebook.

Check out the comments in the post we published on New Zealand Classic Car‘s Facebook page here: 

Ummm, wow.

So I figured the dealer must have made a mistake and listed the car for $150,000 too much. I scrolled down through cheaper cars until I hit a purple Boxster trying to convince people it had something in common with a 911 Turbo. Still nothing.

So I called the dealer. The. Car. Had. Sold. For very close to asking price, within 12 hours of being listed.

I’m off to have a lie down.

NZ Classic Car magazine, March/April 2025 issue 398, on sale now

23 February, 2025

An HQ to die for
Mention the acronym HQ and most people in the northern hemisphere will assume this is an abbreviation for Head Quarters. However, for those born before the mid-’80s in Australia and New Zealand, the same two letters only mean one thing – HQ Holden!
Christchurch enthusiast Ed Beattie has a beautiful collection of Holden and Chevrolet cars. He loves the bowtie and its Aussie cousin and has a stable of beautiful, powerful cars. His collection includes everything from a modern GTSR W507 HSV through the decades to a 1960s Camaro muscle car and much in between.
In the last two Holden Nationals (run biennially in 2021 and 2023), Ed won trophies for the Best Monaro and Best Decade with his amazing 1972 Holden Monaro GTS 350 with manual transmission.
Ed is a perfectionist and loves his cars to reflect precisely how they were on ‘Day 1,’ meaning when the dealer released them to the first customer, including any extras the dealer may have added or changed.

You’re the one that I want – 1973 Datsun 240K GT

21 February, 2025

In the early 1970s, Clark Caldow was a young sales rep travelling the North Island and doing big miles annually. He loved driving. In 1975 the firm he worked for asked Clark what he wanted for his new car, and Clark chose a brand-new Datsun 240K GT. The two-door car arrived, and Clark was smitten, or in his own words, he was “pole vaulting.”
Clark drove it all over the country, racking up thousands of miles. “It had quite a bit of pep with its SOHC 128 hp (96kW) of power mated to a four-speed manual gearbox,” he says. Weighing in at 1240kg meant the power to weight ratio was good for the time and its length at almost 4.5 metres meant it had good street presence.
Clark has been a car enthusiast all his life, and decided around nine years ago to look for one of these coupes. By sheer luck he very quickly found a mint example refurbished by an aircraft engineer, but it was in Perth.