This Is How You Turn the Porsche 550 Into a Floating Ride

The 550 has always been a rare breed, as it stayed in production for just three years, during which time about 90 of them rolled off the assembly lines. To give you an idea of how appreciated these cars still are, even to this day, just consider a Rennsport variant of the thing sold for over $6 million at auction six years ago. Several others of the family, also worth millions, would comprise a good portion of a top ten of most expensive Porsches ever produced.

So, this is a car that should be treated with at most care and respect, both its physical form, but also the image of a rare and precious bird that came to be associated with it. Or, if you’re Floating Motors, you can borrow the iconic lines of the model and come up with the contraption we have here, meant not for the road, but for the water.

Floating Motors is a company that specializes (or it would like to, given how it’s relatively fresh on the market) in making motor boats designed like iconic cars. We’ve already talked about the Fiat 500-inspired La Dolce and La Foil, or the Mini-styled Mare and, to be honest, we kind of enjoyed them, even if we only got to write about them, and not take them for a spin. After all, both the 500 and the Mini are lovable machines, fun to drive, own and watch pass by, and nobody gets offended when their styling cues are used for other products and such.

But Floating Motors also tries its hand and replicating the design of the Porsche 550 into a motor boat, and even if the look is not half bad, some might not be able to help feeling like these guys are messing around with something sacred.

The contraption is called La Veloce, with veloce being the Italian word that stands for fast. The flowing lines of the body were crafted and made to look like those on the car from fibre-reinforced plastic. The entire contraption measures 5 meters (13 feet) in length, 2 meters (6 feet) in width, and 70 cm (28 inches) in height. The thing tips the scale at 1,250 kg (2,756 lbs) dry.

As said, the motorboat can hold two people, unlike the previous Floating Motors we’ve talked about, which were designed to carry four. It can move on the surface of the water thanks to a couple of motors that influence both performance, and price.

The first on the table is a Mercury MerCruiser Verado, capable of generating a staggering 250 hp and shoot the La Veloce to a top speed of 60 knots (69 mph/111 kph) – and it could probably go even faster, but the top speed is limited. In this configuration, the La Veloce kicks off from $95,000, and ordering one involves paying a $10,000 deposit and then waiting for about a year to get the product.

Even more expensive is the variant that uses and electric motor. The unit is a Torqeedo Deep Blue 50 RXL rated at 80 hp and capable of pushing the boat to a top speed of 40 knots (46 mph/74 kph). The price Floating Motors is asking for this one kicks off at $120,000. The same $10,000 amount is required to pre-order one, and the waiting time is the same, one year.