Building cars is hard, and sometimes even the best automakers make mistakes, including Porsche. Thankfully, the automaker was quick to rectify a flub in which two limited-edition 911 S/Ts featured dash plaques with the exact same serial number—1,724—and the mistake might have gone unnoticed if one owner hadn’t attempted to buy an additional customized badge for his car.
Somehow, car 1,742 accidentally received the second 1,724 badge. But Porsche isn’t going to miss an opportunity to capitalize on a mistake that inadvertently created two new rare 911s. The automaker has documented the error as part of the company’s history, cataloging and storing the incorrect badge in its archive.
Porsche is only building 1,963 911 S/Ts to commemorate its 60th anniversary, and the company is currently delivering the last few units. The car has a naturally aspirated 4.0-liter flat-six engine producing 518 horsepower, a six-speed manual transmission, and weighs 3,056 pounds.
Both owners had highly customized their S/Ts, and the two couldn’t have been more different despite the badging. Pedro Solís Klussmann, President of Porsche Club Guatemala, specifically chose car number 1,724. He and his mother were born on the 17th of the month, while his father was born on the 24th.
Photo by: Porsche
His 911 S/T features Shore Blue Metallic exterior paint, the Heritage Design package, and a carbon-fiber roll cage. Suzan Taher, whose car 1,742 had the incorrect badge, had no sentimental connection to the number. Her car wears Rose Red paint with a Guards Red leather-trimmed cabin.
“There is a lot of specialized manual work involved in manufacturing, and human involvement means that mistakes can happen,” said Karl-Heinz Volz, Director of Sonderwunsch at Porsche. “The important thing is how you deal with them,” adding that it was important for the company to apologize to both owners and correct the mistake.
Klussmann and Taher received an invitation to the company’s headquarters in Zuffenhausen, a picture of the two cars, and a box that contains samples of their respective vehicles’ interior and exterior colors. It’s not every day an automaker wants to keep a record of its mistakes, but this small error shows the human side of car building that sometimes creates something truly unique.
