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This just feels like a Sunday car. Porsche’s 356 has the sort of vintage style and charm that makes for enjoyable cruising and certainly would serve as a capable machine for relaxed oceanside or mountain driving. Would those drives necessarily be spirited? Perhaps not, but then you may be better suited to something outside of the vintage car world to meet those purposes. This particular 1965 Porsche 356C Coupe sits in an excellent Bali Blue over Red color combination and as one of the later 356 productions is about as modern as one of these Coupes might come.
Porsche’s 356 isn’t always the most popular car we feature. Cars of this vintage naturally have a more limited audience given their high prices and much lower performance. As such, your money is buying a very different thing and in most cases these only find their way into collections. But I remain quite attracted to them, even if I too must admit that a 356 would probably be a decent way down the list of cars to actually purchase. They’re beautiful in the way only vintage cars tend to be and it can be easy to get lost in the details. The example here comes from very near the end of 356 production: a Ruby Red 1965 Porsche 356C Karmann Coupe, located in Texas, that still wears its original paint and sits with 67,150 miles on it.
I’m going to step back from the world of ultimate performance 911s to bask in the beauty of a vintage Porsche. While there certainly existed performance variants of the 356 back in its day, by modern standards performance is very much beside the point when having a look at one of these cars. They’re very lightweight – I was struck by just how small a 911T appeared relative to the cars around it when I encountered one on the street this past weekend – and there is very little separating driver from machine to dull communication between them, but fewer than 100 horses is just that and modern suspension engineering is another world entirely. Yet, when I see a 356, which I think has only happened twice that I can remember, I’m just as struck by how different they look and how elegant they can be. Many vintage automobiles possess a similar stature and it is the nostalgia for these designs that drives many to seek them out. The example here isn’t entirely original – it’s engine is a period correct unit from the 912 – but it comes in an extremely subtle, but still very pretty, Dolphin Grey and comes from very near the end of 356 production. Here we have a 1964 Porsche 356C SC Karmann Coupe, located in California, with what sounds like around 120K miles on it (the seller assumes the odometer has turned over, but doesn’t have verification).
At times I am almost disappointed when I come across what is an otherwise very nice vintage Porsche that is not in one of the vintage colors. We come across many of these colors so rarely that I guess it feels like a missed opportunity. There are no such problems here as this 1964 Porsche 356C Coupe, located in Colorado, comes in the always alluring shade of Irish Green. Irish Green was made available during the mid-’60s and -’70s and while you still can get it as a special order color it has for the most part disappeared. This seems to be the case with many shades of Green, presumably as automakers move towards metallic paints for these sorts of colors. But these non-metallic greens have a great brightness to them, which is made all the better on the 356 by its stretching into the interior to cover the gauge and radio surrounds. It really creates a nice contrast with the color of the carpets and seats, even if tan tends to work somewhat better than the black interior we see here. Still it’s a wonderful vintage color on a wonderful vintage Porsche.
The Yellow over Black 1964 Porsche 356C we featured back in July is back up for another reserve auction. Given some of the particulars detailed below I would not expect this one to go for top dollar so we’ll have to see if the reserve has been brought into more reasonable territory.
The below post originally appeared on our site July 29, 2014:
