928 (928 (front-engine transaxle V8))

The Car Meant to Replace the 911 Ernst Fuhrmann took charge of Porsche in 1972 holding that the 911, then thirteen years old, was at the end of its development. Design studies for a successor began in 1971 and the project hardened in February 1972. Anatole Lapine styled it, Wolfhelm Gorissen directed the project, Hans Clausecker ran the suspension testing and Hans-Georg Kasten drew much of the interior and exterior detail. The brief was a fast, comfortable, roomy car with a sports car's responses and none of the rear-engine layout's inherited habits. A prototype was running by 1973, but the oil crisis pushed the launch back to the Geneva show of March 1977, with deliveries beginning that autumn as 1978 models. The succession never happened: Peter Schutz, who took over in 1981, chose to sell both cars, the anticipated legislation against rear-engined vehicles never materialised, and the 911 outlived the 928. Porsche's own accounts are not quite consistent on the original intent - its transaxle press kit states the 928 was designed as the 911's replacement, while the Christophorus anniversary feature prefers to describe it as Porsche's first Gran Turismo rather than a direct successor.

Alloy V8, Rear Transaxle, Weissach Axle The engine was a water-cooled, all-aluminium 90-degree V8 of 4,474 cc, the first V8 in a road-going Porsche and, by the company's account, the first water-cooled V8 in a European production car. It drove a rear-mounted transaxle through a rigid torque tube - Porsche called the shaft inside it the fast shaft - producing close to 50:50 weight distribution. The body was a galvanised steel monocoque with aluminium doors, bonnet and front wings, and the polyurethane-faced bumpers were engineered to shrug off impacts at up to 8 km/h without denting. The rear suspension was the car's most durable engineering idea. A semi-trailing arm layout will toe-out under the forward weight transfer of a lifted throttle, which is exactly when a driver least wants it; Porsche replaced the forward bushing of each arm with a short link so that the same loads pull the hub into toe-in instead. The effect was to blunt lift-off oversteer without raising cornering speed, and versions of the idea reached the 993-generation 911 and, in active form, much later cars.

Car of the Year 1978 The 928 won European Car of the Year for 1978, an award that normally goes to mass-market family cars, and it remains the only sports car to have taken it. That verdict has aged better than the launch reception did. Porsche's own customers were sceptical of a Porsche neither air-cooled nor rear-engined, and the first American cars had a difficult year: the federal recall record lists nine campaigns against 1978 model-year 928s, six of them opened on a single day, 2 June 1978, from cracking front suspension adjusters to loose roof mouldings.

Seventeen Years of Increments The 928 was never redesigned, only enlarged. The 928 S of 1980 took the engine to 4,664 cc and 300 PS and added front and rear spoilers; the S2 of 1984 raised it to 310 PS and offered ABS. For 1985 North America received a 5.0-litre 32-valve four-cam engine, which reached the rest of the world in 1987 as the S4 at 320 PS with a smoothed nose and new tail. From 1985 the belt drove only the exhaust camshafts, the intakes taken off them by roller chain. Porsche then withdrew the manual gearbox from the S4 for 1990 and answered the complaints with the GT: manual only, 330 PS, a 40 per cent ZF limited-slip differential as standard, 2,078 built.

The GTS and the End of the Line The last car was the best. The GTS of 1992 stretched the V8 to 5,397 cc and 350 PS, widened the rear arches and fitted larger front brakes and a new wheel design. It also arrived into a collapsing market: sales had fallen since 1989 and did not recover, at 955 cars in 1992, then 811, 645 and 476 before production stopped in 1995. Of 2,904 GTS built, 406 came to the United States. The car meant to succeed the 911 was withdrawn while the 911 carried on, and the model line spent two decades known as the cheapest way into a V8 Porsche - a reputation from which the GTS has now separated itself.

The defining liability is the timing belt, which on all 928s also drives the water and oil pumps. Published intervals do not agree: Classic & Sports Car and Classics World both give four years or 60,000 miles, StuttCars gives four to five years or about 40,000 miles, and the Rennlist 928 engine FAQ reports a factory recommendation of 50,000 miles or five to seven years with many owners working to a shorter cycle on the grounds that belts age whether or not the car is driven. Where the engine is an interference design a failure bends valves; the Rennlist FAQ places the boundary at the 1985 32-valve engines and describes the earlier 16-valve units as non-interference, while Petrolicious puts piston-to-valve contact as far back as the 1980 4.7-litre S. The tensioner is itself a service item, oil-filled and prone to false warnings when empty or when its boot has cracked. Beyond the belt: engine mounts collapse and cause vibration; radiators corrode and are costly to replace; head bolt failures affected 1986-1989 S4 engines before a thicker casting and longer bolts arrived for 1989; some early GTS engines suffered cylinder liner problems; and oil smoke on start-up or overrun points at valve guides or bores. Automatics need their fluid changed and will slip or engage late if they have not been. Manuals suffer worn synchromesh. NHTSA recorded a catalytic converter heat-shield fire risk campaign in 1989 and a cracking plastic fuel gauge mounting nut campaign in 1990.

Documentation of the cambelt and water pump service is the first thing to establish, in writing and with dates, because the interval is time-based as much as mileage-based and a low-mileage car that has sat is not exempt. On 32-valve engines the consequence of getting this wrong is bent valves rather than a tow home. Establish which engine the car actually has and whether it matches the claimed year and market; North American cars ran materially lower outputs than European ones in the early years, and engine swaps are not unknown. The torque tube and its flex plate reward an annual check: incorrect flex plate tension loads the crankshaft thrust bearing, and any fore-and-aft movement in the crankshaft points at a rebuild rather than a repair. Cooling is expensive to neglect - a replacement radiator can pass 1,000 pounds - so receipts for coolant changes and radiator work count for more than they look. On 1987-on cars the LH-Jetronic 2.3 ECU, EZK ignition unit and mass airflow sensor are the usual sources of poor running, and the fuseboard, relays and ECUs live in the passenger footwell where water ingress finds them. Test every electrical function individually. The shell is galvanised and resists corrosion better than most of its contemporaries, but sills, subframe mountings, wheelarches, the tailgate aperture and screen surrounds still repay close inspection. Early cars with the chequered Pasha trim split at the seams. Where a car is presented as a Club Sport, SE or GT, the small production numbers make verification of chassis and option codes proportionate rather than fussy.

The 928 market is not one market. As of August 2026, classic.com's benchmarks read: 928 S2 at $12,637; 928 S4 at $30,434 overall, splitting to $26,187 for automatics and $38,713 for manuals; 928 GT at $46,710 and trending down; and 928 GTS at $57,432 for automatics but $137,775 for manuals, both trending up. The recorded extremes for the model line run from $2,050 for a 1985 S2 in June 2025 to $269,000 for a 9,000-mile 1994 GTS manual in October 2025, with the manual GTS average sale sitting at $138,441 as of August 2026. An S4 outlier - $162,400 in August 2026 for a 1987 Club Sport prototype campaigned by Jochen Mass - shows that provenance can override variant, but only occasionally. Auction evidence tracks the same split. RM Sotheby's sold a 1995 GTS five-speed with fewer than 16,650 miles for $406,500 at Monterey in 2022 - one of the 26 manual GTS delivered to the United States for that model year, and the house's published sold-for figure rather than a hammer price. An automatic 1995 GTS with about 12,000 miles had made $89,600 at Amelia Island in 2019, and in the United Kingdom a 40,639-mile right-hand-drive automatic GTS made 49,500 pounds at the Silverstone Festival Classic Sale in August 2023. The distance between the manual and automatic figures is consistent across both the benchmark data and the auction record.