Happy Wife, Happy Life: This Is the Only Four-Door Porsche 911 in Existence

So William J. Dick Jr. had his General Manager fly all the way to Europe to find a designer who would be willing to build a four-door Porsche 911.

Back then, BMW was still lightyears away from making an M5 Touring, and Mercedes-AMG didn't even think as far as the AMG 63 4-Door Coupe. There wasn't any practical sports car on the market, so someone outside the carmakers had to build it. He did not want an American engineer to rebuild a German car. However, he eventually would have to resort to American coachbuilders.

William Dick was the co-owner of a dealership in Texas and distributed Volkswagen and Porsche cars in the United States. He had a couple of Ferraris and Maseratis parked in his garage. But they were all two-door, non-family cars. There was no way you would be able to drive kids to school or go on a road trip in a two-seat sports car.

Then he and his wife came up with this absurd idea of building a Porsche 911 four-door sedan. Nobody would agree to build it. Eventually, William Dick met Dick Troutman and his buddy, mechanical engineer Tom Barnes, who took on the insane project.

It all started with an early-production Porsche 911S and with Emil Diet, a metalsmith, removing the roof and extending the platform by 21 inches (55.3 centimeters) between pillars A and B.

The move led to a wheelbase extended by 108 inches (2,743 millimeters) from the original 87.0 inches (2,210 millimeters). He had to make room for the extra pair of doors, which opened backward, similar to the rear doors of a Rolls-Royce, and for the rear seats built by Porsche by special request. The roof also had to be elongated. Original Porsche components were used as far as possible.

The car also got Fuchs wheels in August 1967, and the Sportomatic transmission, introduced by Zuffenhausen that year. It wasn't actually a true automatic gearbox but a clutch-less manual, which allowed the driver to shift gears by simply pulling the lever through its standard H-pattern movement.

So the 911 S was not only becoming the first four-door Porsche, but was also one of the first to feature just two pedals.

It was that time, the summer of 1967, when William Dick asked to have the car painted brown to reportedly match one of his pairs of leather shoes. In December 1967, his wife, Hester, got what she wanted. He paid around $20,000 (the equivalent of over $150,000 in 2024) to have the conversion completed just in time for Christmas.

One year later, the car got the attention of the Porsche executives. When they saw it, they started considering building a sports sedan. The project was not green-lighted back then.

The Cayenne was Porsche's first four-door

Porsche would not build a four-door until the 2000s when the Porsche Cayenne arrived with all the controversy that the first Porsche SUV would attract. Purists were horrified. Not only did Porsche roll out a four-door, but also a high-ride vehicle that stands for nothing that the brand used to, they complained.

All of a sudden, Porsche had a family car in its lineup. And it showed in sales figures as the Cayenne dethroned the 911. For instance, in 2015, the Germans sold 13,607 Cayennes and 10,107 911s in the US alone. And the gap between the SUV and the two-seater kept growing. In 2023, 20,288 American customers chose a Cayenne, while 11,728 went for a 911.

However, the Cayenne still kept its sports car credentials but did it standing tall, 9 inches (217 millimeters) from the ground. The Turbo S version came with a 4.5-liter V8 that pumped out 550 horsepower (557 metric horsepower) of torque for an acceleration from 0 to 60 mph (0 to 97 kph) in 4.7 seconds. At the time, the most potent and quickest Porsche 911 came with 456 horsepower and did the 0 to 60 run in 4 seconds flat.

Porsche would not stop at the Cayenne, and in 2009, the carmaker introduced the Panamera. Of course, it had to face backlash. It was against everything that Porsche stood for: a lightweight car with two seats and two doors. But the Germans just went with the demand and came up with a sports car in which customers could drive kids to school in a sedan that came with 542 horsepower (550 metric horsepower) in the most potent guise, Panamera Turbo S, and performance figures to match those of the 911.

The Porsche Panamera followed

But Porsche had started flirting with the idea of a four-door back in 1989, when they built the 989 concept car, which was, in fact, a stretched 911 and looked odd. The Germans fitted it with the then-newly developed 4.5-liter V8 mounted at the front and credited it with a top speed of 174 mph (280 kph).

But Porsche ran out of money, and the four-door was canceled. Two years later, ItalDesign came up with quite a daring proposal: a 932 Panamera II Study, previously badged as the Seat Photo TL.

The concept car was never shown to the public. However, it was obvious that the market was not ready for a four-door Porsche at the time, and the Panamera arrived later on, in 2009.

Things have changed over the years and, right now, the automaker has four such cars in its lineup: the Cayenne, the Panamera, the Macan, and the Taycan EV. And when you think that it all started with a Christmas present…

Today, the car enjoys the spotlight at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, California.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Launch Mode (@launch.mode)