I Custom Ordered a New Porsche 911 Targa.

Since I was a teenager, I’ve loved the Porsche 911 Targa. It’s an iconic design:

I had posters of this thing on my wall all throughout high school and college. The right color was always Guards Red with a black roll bar and black wheels. That right there, so 1980s.

5 years ago, I fulfilled that childhood dream when I bought a new 2019 Targa off the showroom floor. Porsche of Downtown LA had done a really cool job speccing that car: chalk paint and all black accents.

A couple years later during the COVID car price boom, nearly-new cars were wildly overpriced, so I sold it. I used that money to have a few vintage car experiences. I loved the new 911 experience, but I wanted to know what it’d be like living with older Porsches. (That was the only car sale that Yves actively disagreed with and regretted, hahaha – she missed that car a lot, especially its delightful robotic roof.)

In my garage today, I have a couple of great vintage car experiences: my 1964 356 SC and my 1956 Speedster replica are totally phenomenal. I absolutely love driving them. However, they’re not perfect: they don’t have air conditioning, they smell like gas, and they’re wildly unsafe. Me personally, I like long drives in them, even 4-5 hour drives to California – but passengers are less tolerant of the noise, vibration, and wind. Plus, here in Vegas, car clubs offer a lot of fun multi-day distance drives. The local Porsche club frequently does runs to Utah, Arizona, wine country, and so on, and I just can’t do those in the summer with the vintage cars.

My Ferrari 328 was supposed to do that.

I bought my Ferrari 328 with the intention of getting it into good road trip condition, but from the first few drives, it was nothing but problems. While it did technically have air conditioning, the AC wasn’t up to the task of a summer road trip in the desert. To make matters worse, the luggage space was behind the engine, meaning any luggage got hot as all hell, melting Yves’ makeup.

The service experience was a nightmare, too. I couldn’t find a qualified local shop willing to work on it – including the local Ferrari dealer, who refused to service older Ferraris. I sent it over to a highly recommended California mechanic for work, but then that guy ended up going to jail for fraud. Thankfully that happened after I got my 328 back and sold it, but that situation was a mess, and I was just happy to wash my hands of it.

That soured me on Ferraris for a while. In another timeline, I would have traded that 328 in on a Ferrari 458 or 488 Spider. They’re beautiful, make fantastic noises, and have a surprising amount of luggage space despite their small size. However, the terrible Ferrari service experience made me appreciate how good the Porsche service experience is, at least the California and Vegas experiences, so I came back to 911s.

I custom ordered one of the last new 992.1 Targas.

The 911 is just so damn practical and easy. It rides smoothly for a sports car, goes like hell, and has a huge amount of luggage space for a relatively small sports/GT car. It’s not an exotic-looking car by any means – they’re pretty regular-looking – but the Targa top adds some flair and drama.

I’ve always wanted to custom order a new 911 Targa, but I only wanted to do it if I could get a custom paint color like Meissen Blue or Mexico Blue from Porsche’s Paint-to-Sample program. Unfortunately, Porsche only opens up a limited number of Paint to Sample cars in a limited time, and that window had already closed for the 992.1 generation. The new 992.2 generation was coming in 2025, so I was holding out for that.

In mid-2024, a few things happened. First, rumors started to indicate that Porsche would only offer manual transmissions on special, limited-edition cars like the GT models. That was a bummer because I kinda wanted a stick (although that meant I’d have to give up on adaptive cruise control and remote start, both of which are helpful in Vegas.)

Second, one of the Gaudin Porsche sales guys mentioned that they were no longer charging additional dealer markup (ADM) on new custom-ordered 911s. Interest rates were up, new car purchases were down, and the next generation of 911 (992.2) was coming, so new 911 orders had cooled off. They had an allocation for a 992.1 Targa 4S with Oct/Nov delivery, so I took the plunge and gave them a deposit to custom order it for myself.

And third, shortly after I claimed my order spot, Porsche announced that prices were going way up for the 992.2 generation, like 15% higher. I did a quick config of a paint-to-sample Targa, and it’d be over $220k. Yowza.

I went with red & black & red.

I like really loud colors, especially on sports cars, but this late in the 992.1’s cycle, they’d boiled down the color options to a pretty limited quantity. They mostly just had the German rainbow, aka white, gray, black, and silver. The only remaining bright color was the classic Guards Red, which works out well for me because it’s the color of the Porsches on my teenage posters anyway.

Here’s how I specced my Targa 4S build:

I opted for a black Targa bar and black wheels to mimic the classic 1980s Targa look. I doubled down on Guards Red on the inside as well:

I’m partially red/green colorblind, so reds have to be really saturated for me to get a red vibe. Given how loud it looks to me, I can only imagine how loud it looks to the non-colorblind folks out there, hahaha. And yes, that’s a stick shift in the console. The 992’s 7-speed stick is delightful to use, and I rarely have to deal with stop-and-go traffic in Vegas, so I went for it.

The car’s in the midst of assembly in Germany as we speak, and Porsche sends you photos as your car goes down the assembly line.

Fingers crossed, it should arrive in Vegas around late October, early November. I’d always dreamed of taking European delivery too, but the timing just didn’t work out with my schedule.