Fifty years of the Porsche 911

In the fall of 1963, a small group of Porsche employees arrived at the International Auto Show in Frankfurt to present the company’s vision for the future. Due to replace the Volkswagen-derived four-cylinder 356 was a new model called the 901, which featured both a refined version of the 356’s bathtub silhouette as well as two more cylinders. Initially, the biggest controversy was over the model’s name; Peugeot pressed its rights to three-digit appellations where the middle number was zero. So the 901 became the 911, and Porsche became Porsche.