You know how most things suck now? I mean, except this site, whatever cars you have, and, of course, you. Everything else, though? Crap. Unmitigated AI-debased crap. But I’m here to tell you it didn’t have to be this way! It could have all been different if one crucial change had been made. That change? Well, it’s a simple one, one that even an omnipotent child could make happen: send an extremely coked-up version of me back in time to take control of Porsche in the late 1960s so that the company could release a van based on the 914.
Now before you start to argue that this course of action wouldn’t help anything, let me just stop you right there; I’ve done the math. And not just normal math – math with letters and symbols and blobs of dripped mustard, the kind of ethereal math that makes more parochially-minded people do voluminous and violent spit-takes as they are confronted with the Sacred Trigonometry of my reasoning.
Here’s how it would work: this alternate version of me – a drug-addled demon so damaged and insecure that he wears drywall stilts at all times to mask his short stature and whose personal habits makes Hunter S. Thompson look like Cotton Mather – would materialize into the world around 1964, when the Porsche 914 was first being conceived, as a way to have one model that would replace Volkswagen’s top end (the Type 3-based Type 34 Karmann-Ghia) and Porsche’s bottom end, the four-cylinder 912. The car that would result from this venture was the Porsche 914.
That’s great and all, and while I’m fond of the 914, I realize it’s not enough to change the course of history for the better. But you know what would be? A van version of the 914! Alternate-universe coke-demon me would have proposed this to Porsche, and forced it into production with a combination of blackmail, violence, seduction, and, in at least one disturbing incident, cannibalizing a human finger. Look, I never said this alternative version of me was a good man! He is most definitely not. But he understands what must be done, and focuses on that task with single-minded madness.
The 914 van would leverage as much of the existing 914 design as possible, using the entire mechanical layout unchanged and much of the lower unibody, suitably reinforced. The front seat would be mounted atop the fuel tank, just aft of the front axle centerline, and the deep 914 front trunk would become the front seat footwells.
This is a three-row van, with the last two rows sharing a lower bench that would be placed atop the engine, with the rearmost row facing backwards, its footwell formed from the rear trunk of the 914. These rear seats would slide on rails fore and aft to fold flat into a long load floor that could be used for sleeping, too.
The design concept of the 914 would be retained, with pop-up headlights in the front (a first for a van, I think?) and retaining the lift-off targa roof from the center of the van, which could be stored in a slot on the floor of the second row area.
Would this van be strangely tall and perhaps a bit narrow? Most likely, yes! Does that bother me? No. Not even a little bit. Those people in that picture, for example, would be so much happier with a 914 van there than a conventional 914. They could be camping in that rocky valley in the comfort of their van, instead of sitting out there on the damp grass and rocks like a couple of yutzes, getting their jeans all muddy. They could be making sweet, sweet love and then sweet, sweet tea in that van instead!
This sporty van with pop-up headlights and a targa roof would have, as my math suggests, changed the direction of world culture, economy, and human civilization in general, culminating in a utopia around the year 2018. Remember the whole COVID mess? In this timeline, instead of a pandemic with a virus that made everyone sick, there would be two viruses: one, a computer virus that used unexpected new neutrino-math to change everyone’s bank balances to have a minimum of $9.14 million dollars, and a parallel biological virus that somehow made everyone 42% sexier and transmutated everyone’s bowels so that human waste was now a clean-burning fuel source.
Yes, all of this from just making a van version of the 914! I don’t pretend to understand how it all works; I just know that it does. Now, who has a functioning time machine, some drywall stilts, and a lot of cocaine? We need to talk.
Top graphic base image: Porsche
The post If Porsche Put Me In Charge In The 1970s I’d Have Made A 914 Van And The World Would Be Better Now appeared first on The Autopian.
