See the big reveal of the fully restored Porsche 928. After a number of months, the car is back together and all the final touches are done. This episode shows the beautiful finish of the paint and all of the modern enhancements that have been made to the car. It also shows how great the 928 looks on the road. The car has now been wet sanded and polished, the windows are being tinted, keyless entry installed, and a modern chipset has been installed and the car tuned.
Transcript:
Hi everyone and welcome to Center Lane and this last final episode of Bruce's 928. Well, we've been working on the car for a number of months and today is the day that I get to unveil it and show you what the final finished car looks like.
Now, if you've enjoyed this series, and if you like Center Lane then please subscribe to my channel, click the bell to be notified of future episodes.
Now, what we're going to do is unveil the car, I'm going to show you what it looks like. It's beautiful and shiny. And then we're going to take it for a ride and show you how it performs on the road. Here we go.
Well here's the car, and look at how beautiful that shine is. It really was worth taking the extra step to have it wet sanded and cut polished. The car just gleams, there's hardly any orange peal left on this car. The wet sanding has really knocked that down and made a nice, flat, mirror-like finish. The other think that I'm thrilled about is these wheels. During one of my episodes, I talked about wheels, and I was going to leave these wheels in polished aluminum. Now, I finally settled on going with the GTS wheels. The Cup II style wheels which were the stock wheel on the GTS model of this car. I ended up having the re-finished at Alloy Wheel Repair in Richmond and I had them done in this hyper silver colour. It's a little richer than a regular silver. And I think the gold emblem on the center hub really looks nice. I really am thrilled with the car. I think the tinted windows look fantastic. It looks brand new. So why don't we take it out on the road.
Well here I am, driving in the 928. It's really nice now that this car is completely finished. With all of the interior improvements that we've made. With the Alcantara in here, the Alcantara on the headliner along with the sound deadening material. We put some HushMat in the ceiling and the door panels. It's made it quite quiet in the car. The door panels, even the steering wheel here. It really does have a high-end, kind of luxury feel to it which is really nice.
The car drives amazing. Now, for those of you who have never driven a 928, the car is not really a sports car, it's more of a grand tourer. And, you know, that all goes along with it being an automatic. 85% of these cars were automatic and that's because they were more of the executive sports car. They were really a grand tourer that was made to get out on the Autobahn and drive for 8 or 10 hours straight in extreme comfort.
This car has all kinds of features that weren't really all that common at the time. Not only does it have air-conditioning, but it has climate control which was kind of an unusual thing. It's got memory seats, power seats...power seats was not common in Porsches at all. This car has power seats but it also has a 3 position memory. It's got really unique things like, the glove box is air conditioned. So if you have cold drinks and you want to put them in your glove box they will stay cold all day while you're driving along and enjoying your Autobahn cruising.
I put in a couple little extras in this car just to make it a little bit more modern. I put in a rearview mirror that is automatic so it automatically dims but also has Homelink® on it. So I've got my garage doors all set up and programmed into my rearview mirror. So that's a nice little modern touch. I mentioned that I put keyless, I put keyless entry onto the car. So normally you would have had to use the key to get in and out of the car, and as a result of that, you'll often see the little ring around the key slot on the doors often has the paint rubbed off because people are turning their hand, rubbing their hand over it. And so the keyless entry prevents that from happening and it's a nice feature too. It's got a button on it so I can release the trunk as well. So that is a nice little modern feature on the car.
One of the things I wanted to do with the car is keep it as original as possible. I have done some interior enhancements like the Alcantara and leather combo. But, I wanted to keep the original Blaupunkt stereo in this car. Now, when I got it, it didn't have an original stereo. Most of the time when you find a 928, someone's replaced the stereo because the Blaupunkt ones don't seem to last. This one was no different, it had a Kenwood stereo in it, and it doesn't really look right in it, it didn't match. The Blaupunkt looks right and I wanted to keep the original because I wanted to get collector plates for the car and the collector program here in British Columbia, they do not like after-market stereos being put in cars. They want something, at least to be era correct but more importantly, true to the origin of the car. So I found the Blaupunkt stereo online. I got it from SW Audio and it's new old stock. So it came in a box, brand new. It was quite expensive. You know, these stereos probably back in the 90's were about 400 bucks. They're about 3-times that now for new, old stock. But, it really matches. Looks beautiful and I wired it in so that it has...you know those little cassettes that you push into the...and they have a wire on them so you can plug your iPod in or whatever. Well, Colin, he had wired it in for me so that the wire went through the back of the deck. So it's got that kind of a style cassette in it but the wire comes out the back and it's fed to my iPod. I have this special iPod that's built into my console. And so, that's kind of a nice little feature. I can play all my modern tunes but the deck looks original, looks like I'm just playing a cassette, which I kind of like.
Another little thing I did was, I added LED lights to the door handles so that you can see those at night which is a nice little feature. This is the Bluetooth interface and the Bluetooth does tie in with this, it connects to my stereo. So with all those modern amenities, it makes the car really nice to drive. I can use my Bluetooth, I can talk on my phone, I can play my music. It's really fantastic. This steering wheel, I have to say, this steering wheel's made a big difference. To have it covered in both leather and Alcantara and the customization with the logo on the airbag really looks nice. And the sound deadening material, I talked about that earlier, the sound deadening really quiets down the interior of this car and makes it feel very luxurious. Especially when you go to slam the door, close the doors and that kind of thing, its really got a thunk. A deadness to it, which is kind of nice. And the car, it always gets looks.
I mean, I'll drive by a group of people and they'll see the car. Not everybody knows what it is because it's been a while since you saw these on the road on a regular basis. But there certainly is a lot of people that have an appreciation for them, especially, you know, guys my age remember them from back in the 80's and early 90's that the cars were aspirational cars. You know, it was the executive sports car. I remember on Risky Business, Tom Cruises dad in the show owned one of these things. And he was a stock broker or something and very well off and this is what he had so it's that kind of a car that suits that kind of a person.
Driving along in this car, it's really quite amazing. It's luxurious, it's plush, it's got all the Alcantara and the leather. I'm surrounded by it. This car was made in 1990 but really, it's technology from the 80's. When you think about actually the early 80's and some of the features in this car, really quite amazing. The s4's like this one is, they came out in 1987 and it's got this really cool trip computer in it that tells you all the things that you kind of are used to now with modern cars, you know, your fuel economy, it'll give you a digital readout of your speed, and it will tell you the outside temperature and all that kind of stuff so it's pretty cool. We're used to that now but back in 1987 when that feature first showed up on these cars, that was pretty hi-tech stuff.
When I was 20 years old and I saw this car on movies, I thought man, that was the car to have. I mean, I dreamed that this would be a car to have. And eventually I realized that dream, you know, it's an attainable dream because these cars really have not gone up in value like some other Porsches. You know, you look at 911's from the same era, and they're astronomical in price and since I bought this car, they have gone up, but not nearly at the same rate that 911's have. I'm sure at some point, their day will come and these cars will become very expensive and much harder to attain. And there wasn't that many of them made. You know, I think there was only about 65,000 928's made in the whole run. By comparison, I have a '67 Mustang and they made close to half a million in 1967 alone. So gives you an idea of how rare these cars are.
So for me this really is a dream come true to own this car. I always wanted one. When I was a teenager it was the dream car. A true 80's supercar. And owning it is a real pleasure and I just love being in it. It is a part of who I am, and I'm going to enjoy it, and I'm going to drive it, and I'm going to enjoy watching everybody watch this car go by
because it is a real head turner.