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I’ve chosen to feature this car almost purely out of curiosity. The Soft-window Targa is one of those cars where the design, from an aesthetic perspective, leaves me cold, but from a functional perspective I always find very intriguing. These cars are sort of an engineering peculiarity; only existent for a few years as Porsche’s answer to the need for an open-top vehicle that would also meet safety requirements the Soft-window Targa is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a Targa where the window section behind the roll hoop could be lowered to create an airiness more akin to a cabriolet. These provided a variety of open-top motoring options between fully open and fully closed and with the integrated roll hoop they were sure to meet the increasingly stringent safety standards that Porsche worried would render the cabriolet obsolete. I just hate the look. With the rear window down these have always looked like something jerry-rigged in someone’s garage and no matter how interesting I think the design is I just can’t get past that. C’est la vie. Available for both the 911 and the 912, here we have a Burgundy 1968 Porsche 912 Soft-window Targa, located in California, with a stated 12,703 miles on it.
The very rare Gulf Blue 911S Soft-window Targa we featured back in September is up for auction once again. Rather than the $195,000 Buy It Now price of the original listing, this is now up as a reserve auction with a starting bid of $145,000. Also, rather than Argentina it now resides in Denver, Colorado, which should make it a little easier for interested to buyers to view the car and see how it is sorted out. Any 911S is extremely valuable so we’ll have to see what sort of bidding this particular car might receive.
The below post originally appeared on our site September 1, 2014:
Last week we featured a 912 Soft-window Targa that sat on the value-end of the scale for these peculiar models, even if that particular example was priced a bit high. Now we are going to move almost entirely to the other end of the spectrum. The Soft-window Targa was not only made for the 912, but also was available on the 911, including the top-of-the-range and highly sought after 911S. In this case we’re just stacking rarity on rarity with a rare color of a rare variant of a rare model. It should come as no surprise then that this car is priced at nearly $200K, 5 times the high price for last week’s 912. But this post isn’t about finding an interesting value, but rather about coming across one of the most interesting 911s made in the late ’60s. Here we have a Gulf Blue 1967 Porsche 911S Soft-window Targa that comes in at just under 125K miles and also sports an interesting classic rally pedigree.
The peculiarity of the Soft-window Targa provides us a window into the way innovative designs and attempts to adapt can end up as short diversions that ultimately fail. Very few of these cars were ever made and fewer still exist today. Out of some concern for the continued viability of the convertible because of increasingly stringent safety regulations, Porsche engineered some Targa versions of the 911 and 912 with an attached roll-hoop and folding rear window, hence “soft-window”. With its combination of folding rear window and removable top these cars provided multiple ways to enjoy one’s open-top drive, yet it was always going to be more fussy to deal with than either a hard-window Targa or a Cabriolet. After a few years of production, the Targa was reverted exclusively to the hard-window version and the Soft-window exists as sort of an interesting anomaly. Ultimately, it seems these soft-windows showcase some of the difficulty the Targa has enjoyed more generally. Still, they were an interesting attempt at a solution to potential problems, even if those problems never materialized to the degree Porsche expected. The example we have here is a 1968 Porsche 912 Soft-window Targa, located in California, with 109,125 miles on it.
