924 (924, Turbo, Carrera GT)

A Volkswagen That Became a Porsche

In March 1972 Volkswagen placed development order EA 425 with Porsche for a successor to the VW-Porsche 914. Porsche's proposal, a water-cooled four-cylinder in the nose driving a gearbox at the rear axle, was accepted, and the package was fixed early enough that the young designer Harm Lagaaij, working under Anatole Lapine, had to draw a body around production parts already chosen; the glass hatch came from a rival proposal by Dick Soderberg and the interior was Hans Braun's. Then VW's new chairman, Toni Schmuecker, canceled the project in late 1974 on grounds of product policy. Porsche bought the rights and tooling in January 1975, showed the car to the press at La Grande-Motte in the Camargue that November, and put it on sale in early 1976 as the Type 924, built for Porsche at the Audi plant in Neckarsulm. The base price was $9,395 in the United States and DM 23,240 in Germany, made possible by the VW and Audi components inside it.

The Cheap Porsche

The engine was the EA831, a 1,984 cc single-cam four with an iron block shared with the VW LT van, giving 123 hp at 5,800 rpm on Bosch K-Jetronic in Europe and a meager 95 hp in the United States, where the car arrived in July 1976 as a 1977 model at $9,395. An Audi four-speed gearbox sat at the back as a transaxle, the brakes were Audi discs and drums, and the rear suspension used Beetle-derived trailing arms on torsion bars. Motor Sport's May 1977 test found the chassis exceptionally good and the rest of the car blandly unexciting, harsh all the way to its 6,500 rpm limit and not fully developed. None of it dented sales. A year into production every second Porsche built was a 924, the Martini edition celebrated the 1976 championship, and the 100,000th car was completed in 1982.

Turbo, Then Carrera GT

Porsche closed the gap to the 911 and 928 with the 924 Turbo for 1979: a Porsche-designed head, a KKK K26 blowing at 0.7 bar into a 7.5:1 engine, 168 hp at 5,500 rpm, four-wheel discs and 140 mph. A Series 2 with DME ignition and 175 hp followed for 1981, and North America got an introductory edition of 600 cars. The Turbo was also the basis of a Targa study, job 927/57, run from May 1977 to February 1980 and dropped on cost and body stiffness. In 1980 came the Carrera GT, a Group 4 homologation special with an intercooler, larger turbocharger, raised compression, polyurethane arches and 207 hp at 2,471 lb; 400 had to be built in two years and 250 were sold before the line started. Its evolutions were the 1981 GTS, 50 series cars in Guards Red at 110,000 marks with 240 or 242 hp depending on whose figure is used, and the 370 hp GTR. Three works cars finished sixth, twelfth and thirteenth at Le Mans in 1980, Al Holbert and Derek Bell taking the thirteenth-placed GTP as high as sixth by the thirteenth hour; Walter Roehrl won four German rallies in a GTS prototype in 1981.

Fuhrmann, Schutz and the 944

The 924 was central to chairman Ernst Fuhrmann's belief that the 911 was on its way out, a view his successor Peter W. Schutz reversed in his third week in 1981. The four-cylinder line nevertheless continued: the wide-bodied 944 arrived in 1982 with an all-Porsche 2.5-liter engine, and the 924 was withdrawn from the United States after that year while soldiering on in Europe. The Turbo ceased in 1982 except in Italy, where tax rules kept it going to 1984.

The 924S and the End

For 1986, or 1985 by Porsche's own timeline, the 2.0 gave way to the 924S: the narrow 924 shell with the 944's balance-shaft 2.5-liter four, 148 hp at first and 158 hp for 1988, returning to America at under $20,000 as a car the PCA describes as quicker than the dearer base 944. Production ended in June 1988. By Porsche's account 150,684 had been built, almost as many as the 911 over the same twelve years, and the transaxle line it started ran to nearly 400,000 cars by 1995.

The 2.0 EA831 is robust but crude. Blue smoke on start-up is common because the pistons lack oil scraper rings, radiators get holed by stones and the fuel system in a barn-found car is best cleaned before any attempt to start it; new tanks come only from Porsche. Motor Sport's 1977 test car used two pints of oil in a thousand miles. The timing belt is due every 30,000 miles or three to four years but the engine survives a snapped belt. The 924S engine does not: it is an interference unit whose valves and pistons share space, so a failed belt bends valves, and its cam and balance belts, rollers, tensioners and water pump all have fixed intervals. Its Bosch airflow meter and DME relay both give trouble. The Turbo adds a turbocharger with no post-shutdown cooling, so bearing life depends on how the car was driven, and Porsche Club GB expects failure around 50,000 miles. Across the range the transaxle layout means clutch replacement is expensive, worn synchromesh and a sloppy lever from a worn ball joint are ordinary, torque-tube bearings fail, and automatics announce trouble with black fluid and a burning smell. Steering universal joints rattle, the power-steering hose seeps, and front discs and pads last about 25,000 miles on a 924 and less on a Turbo or 924S. Electrical faults are almost always earths, corroded terminals, tired hazard and light switches, a failed headlamp-motor switch or a bodged repair; the battery light needs a filament bulb, not an LED, or the alternator will not excite. Dashboards crack, seat seams split and Grassroots Motorsports owners add that VW-grade interior plastics and Audi-badged parts priced as Porsche parts are the daily realities.

Year and shell first. Porsche Club GB records zinc coating of specific areas for the 1977 model year and the entire bodyshell from 1978, while Classics World says pre-1981 cars were galvanized only on the lower half; either way, an early car needs closer scrutiny of sills, the battery tray, rear suspension mounts, floors and arches, and the 924S sills are singled out as more rust-prone. Panel gaps are a large 0.28 in (7 mm) from new, so what matters is whether they are even and whether the paint matches at the front. Water is the recurring enemy: a hatch seal, blocked sunroof drains and the battery area all let it in, and wet or crusty carpet in the passenger footwell tells the story. On a 2.0, ask for oil pressure of 5 to 6 bar at cold idle and 2 to 3 bar warm, expect some blue smoke on start-up from the design's lack of oil scraper rings, and ask when the belt was last done; it is non-interference, so neglect is cheap here but not on the interference 2.5 in the 924S, where the US specialist Atlantic Motorcar works to 30,000 miles or three to five years and replaces the water pump, tensioners and seals with the belts. A hot-start problem should have been cured, not lived with. On a Turbo, listen to the turbocharger; there is no cooling after shutdown and Porsche Club GB puts bearing failure at around 50,000 miles, with replacement a major line item. Check gear engagement and the clutch pedal, because the torque-tube layout makes a clutch a complicated job that owners on Grassroots Motorsports advise avoiding altogether, and listen for torque-tube bearing noise. Inside, the dashboard top cracks in sun, seat seams and the driver's bolster split, and the electrics suffer from bad earths and baked battery-to-starter cable; on a 924S the DME relay is a known weakness. A Carrera GT should carry its build certificate and a numbers-matching engine, and its chassis number should sit in the WP0ZZZ93ZBN700 range quoted on the cars sold at Paris in 2017 and Silverstone in 2024.

As of September 2026, classic.com puts the average sale across the whole 924 line at $26,015, a figure pulled upward by the competition cars, with model benchmarks of $10,440 for the base 924, $11,384 for the 924S, $17,139 for the 924 Turbo, $72,175 for the Carrera GT, $318,214 for the Carrera GTS and $370,857 for the GTR and GTP. The Turbo's own classic.com page gives a benchmark of $17,213 and an average of $17,287 as of September 2026, and the spread behind that average is wide: a 94,000-mile 1982 car at $13,000 in May 2026 and an 88,000-mile 1981 at $9,540 in June 2026, against $77,000 in March 2026 for the Holbert Racing widebody out of Magnus Walker's collection at RM Sotheby's, where a standard 50,512-mile 1980 Turbo in the same sale made $14,850. Ordinary road cars sit in the teens, classic.com recording a 1988 924S at $18,900 in August 2026 and a 1978 924 at $15,935 in September 2026, both fixed-price. The competition cars run on a separate ladder: RM Sotheby's sold the ex-works Le Mans 924 GTP, chassis 924003, for $423,000 at Arizona in January 2026, and Broad Arrow sold the Brumos Le Mans class-winning Carrera GTR for $375,000 at the Quail in August 2026 against the $600,000 to $800,000 estimate the Porsche Club of America reported before the sale. Carrera GT money is thinner than the benchmark suggests, classic.com's average standing at $63,388 as of September 2026, and Sports Car Market valued a Paris car at $71,934 when it sold for $58,360 with premium at Artcurial in November 2017. None of the aggregator pages fetched states whether buyer's premium is included in the figures they publish.