Here we have another 911E, though this time with Porsche’s way-before-its-time Sportomatic transmission. We feature very few examples of the Sportomatic so I wanted to feature this, in part, to get a sense of the relative market contrasts between these and a manual-transmission 911. But also because it’s nice to show some of Porsche’s more innovative designs, even when, in the case of the Sportomatic, those designs were addressing concerns that didn’t appear to exist at the time. As essentially the precursor to their Tiptronic, the Sportomatic was a clutchless manual that allowed drivers to do the shifting but without having to concern themselves with learning how to operate a clutch. While Porsche referred to these as an automatic, there really wasn’t a fully automatic setting as gears still needed to be shifted, but the lack of a clutch allowed Porsche potentially to spread its base market to those who were unable to operate a full manual. So these are a little bit unusual and not very common, even though the Sportomatic was an available option until 1980. The example here is a Gemini Blue 1973 Porsche 911E, located in California, with 115,931 miles on it.
