This near-million-dollar hypercar has been taken apart and rebuilt 78 times.
Porsche
Porsche’s Carrera GT is getting up there in years now, and though Porsche didn’t build that many of them, there are still enough on the roads that Porsche offers a course to select dealer technicians on how to service the model. After all, with 10 cylinders and a carbon monocoque chassis, it’s not like any other road-going Porsche.
To facilitate this training course, it helps to have a car, but because the Carrera GT is so rare and expensive, not even Porsche can afford to have lots of them just lying around to be used as training tools. Instead, it has one for the whole North American market, and that single car gets disassembled and reassembled three or four times a year. In total, Porsche estimates, according to an announcement made on Monday, that the car has been torn down and built up 78 times since 2004.
“I was there when it came off the Lufthansa 747 cargo plane here in Atlanta in 2004,” Bob Hamilton, Porsche technician in charge of the Carrera GT class, said in a statement. “We put it on a flatbed and drove it to Phoenix Parkway, where our old training facility was located.”
Think about that. This car, with its screaming 605 horsepower 5.7-liter V10, now worth close to a million dollars, gets torn to bits and carefully reassembled into a working supercar. The training car currently has around 1,445 miles on it, mostly from being taken to customer events or from numerous shakedown drives after it’s been reassembled.
Think about the last time you tried to fix something on your own car. How many extra pieces did you have at the end? It’s clear that the individuals who go through the Carrera GT class are a whole other caliber of technician, and it’s mighty impressive.