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What is the price for perfection? We saw Andrew look at a perfect and near brand-new W220 S500 yesterday, but his cutting critique of that car was, as several people noted, spot on. It’s not a desirable model, nor is it one that is likely to be collectable anytime soon. For some time, the same was said of the E36 M3. However, quickly things are changing. Several high-priced examples have come to market recently that have investors questioning if the E30 is the go-to it was for the past two years. Most notably, we saw the one-off Giallo Canadian Edition ’94 M3 hit near $65,000. That car looked near showroom fresh, having only accrued 30,000 miles since new. Today’s example has only about one third of that:
I’m going to break away rather abruptly from looking to find 911s we can all aspire to in order to look at a 911 we can aspire to in a different sort of way. More along the lines of peak aspiration I guess you’d say. For buyers for whom the standard 911 has proved too soft or too refined – basically too suited for the masses – Porsche has offered their RS model. It hasn’t always been available, especially during the company’s leaner years, but when available the Carrera RS (along with the later GT3 RS) has offered the sort of pared down high performance that few buyers desire and even fewer would actually purchase. For the 993, Porsche took this ethos a step further offering a Clubsport option for the RS. The package effectively deleted everything from the interior that was unnecessary, including the carpets, and then welded in a full roll cage to provide extra degrees of rigidity and safety to the chassis. In what I can only assume was a strange twist of comedy, the original purchaser of this 1995 Porsche 911 Carrera RS Clubsport asked Porsche to put the air-conditioning back in the car. While we might surmise that request was because the owner wanted to actually drive the darn thing and thus needed at least that small bit of comfort, this RS sits with fewer than 20K miles on it. If we want to look on the bright side, I suppose it makes a very rare car even rarer still.
Every now and then, I spot a black W124 Mercedes-Benz E320 Cabriolet tooling around the neighborhood. These days, this is a car that sticks out. It doesn’t necessarily look vintage, but has a crisp, stately appearance that is sadly lacking in most new vehicles these days. As we move further towards vehicles with all kinds of computer assistance and, dare I say it, self-driving cars, it’s nice to look back two decades and find a car like this with classic style mixed in with modern convenience. This 1995 E320 Cabriolet for sale in New York represents the final year for the W124 and this one is mint, showing almost 30,000 miles on the odometer.
A couple weeks ago I wrote a sort of ode to purple as an exterior color in regard to an Aubergine 911T. Here we have another purple 911 and while Amaranth Violet doesn’t quite possess the same elegance and beauty as Aubergine it is probably an even more rare choice among the models of any marque. Like Aubergine, this color doesn’t hide its purple, in fact it’s even more upfront about it and wouldn’t be mistaken for any other color. For some that in itself might be an issue, but it kind of works on the 993 in a way that I think it would not on earlier 911s. Regardless, owners of these cars are likely to very rarely, if ever, come across another one. We certainly can’t decry its uniqueness. Here we have an Amaranth Violet 1995 Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet, located in Texas, with 81,088 miles on it.
The California-based tuning company Dinan has been providing performance upgrades for BMWs since 1979. There’s no shortage of newer cars on the market that purport to have some kind of mods from the firm; 20 cars come up in eBay right now under a search for Dinan, and Carter wrote up this neat ’08 550i M Sport Dinan the other day, for example. But it’s even more interesting to stumble upon an example of an older car with some Dinan components, like this ’95 540i.
