2013 Porsche 904 Living Legend Concept

The design process: from the first drawing to the drivable prototype

The design process starts with a sketch. This is visualised in the next step as a 3D model. As soon as an idea is to be developed further, small models are produced in a scale of 1:3, then followed by hard models in the scale 1:1. “The virtual world is the first step, but you especially have to experience the unusual models in reality in order to understand whether a car has small, large or surprising proportions,” says Michael Mauer, Vice President Style Porsche. In contrast to the development of a production model where several models are always developed with different styling formats, the vision projects, on the other hand, concentrate on a single vision model which serves as a protagonist for the central idea.

Sometimes good ideas are not so very far away – maybe even somewhere else in our family Group. Volkswagen had been conducting research into an economical one-litre car since 2002, before launching the concept as the limited-edition Volkswagen XL in 2014. Most of all, this study piqued the interest of the Porsche Design Studio due to its carbon monocoque chassis. This was because the lightweight and compact vehicle architecture offered the opportunity to develop a radically small and minimalist sports car. So, as the design team started to experiment with different body styles, they quickly realised, to their utter astonishment, that the car they’d designed had very similar proportions and dimensions to one of the lightweight racing legends from the factory museum – the Porsche 904.

The result was an incredibly compact and efficient mid-engined sports car. With its low cockpit and sculpturally flared wheel arches, it confidently transported the purist design idea of the legendary Porsche Carrera GTS from 1963 into the present day. A high-revving V2 motorcycle engine would have been a suitable power plant for the Porsche 904 Living Legend, which barely weighed more than 900 kg.

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