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Will Porsche and VW Team Up to Revive the 914?
September 11, 2008
Motor Trend is talking about a Porsche-badged version of the previously announced VW sports car that will be revealed in Los Angeles in a couple of months. The VW sports car is supposed to be targeted at the Lotus Elise, weighing in around 2200 lbs and producing about 170 hp.
Speculation about a Porsche version is just that — speculation. But, with Porsche gaining more and more control over VW, and Porsche’s recent talk of the possibility of 4-cylinder engines, is makes some sense.
The original 914 was a joint project between VW and Porsche, meant to replace both the Porsche 912 and VW’s Karmann-Ghia. In Europe, the 4-cylinder 914 was sold as a Volkswagen while the 6-cylinder version was sold as a Porsche. However, Porsche was fearful that strategy would negatively affect their brand in North America, so they made a deal with VW so that both versions were sold as a Porsche over here.
Personally, I would LOVE a smaller, lighter Porsche to compete with the Elise. It would be cool to see the VW version use VW’s 1.4 liter turbo/supercharged TSI 4-cylinder while the Porsche version could use a flat-4, since a Porsche engineer recently said it would be “relatively easy” to remove a couple cylinders from the new A91 flat-6.
[source: Motor Authority]
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