Porsche 911 targas: lifting the lid

By Charlie Calderwood

| 15 Dec 2025

Classic & Sports Car – Porsche 911 targas: lifting the lid

The persistent (and ultimately unfounded) rumours that cabriolets would be banned in the USA in the aftermath of Ralph Nader’s landmark 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed crops up in the story of virtually every European sports coupé and cabriolet designed in the late 1960s and early ’70s, to the extent that it has become a cliché.

It’s true of some cars, the Triumph Stag and TR7 for instance, but while it’s often cited as a factor in the story of the 911 targa, the origins of Porsche’s segment-bending roof option are far more complex – and the Stuttgart outfit has reinvented it three times over.

You only need to look at the timing to see that the American safety story doesn’t fully explain things, because Porsche’s first targa styling prototype was built in June 1964.

‘The name came from the Targa Florio, a race Porsche had won four times by 1964’

That’s more than a year before Nader’s book was released in November 1965, and nine months before the first Senate subcommittee began investigating the safety of automotive designs.

Ferry Porsche was pushing for an open version of the 911 from the start, having always had a personal preference for cabriolets, and Karmann built a full convertible prototype in 1964.

That model struggled with the question of where to stow the roof in a rear-engined car.

Ferry wanted to avoid the pram-style hood resting on the rear deck, à la Beetle Cabriolet, so it featured a new compartment at the rear.

The Porsche 911 2.0 targa’s cabin has ergonomic flaws, but it’s an analogue experience

The solution resulted in a remarkably sleek silhouette, but it robbed significant space from the engine bay.

That led Porsche to Ferry’s other idea: a hoop across the middle of the cabin in the B-pillar position, to hold two separate panels.

Still clinging to his dream of a streamlined roofless model, Ferry suggested this roll-over bar could be collapsible at first.

Rigidity issues, ever the enemy of convertible conversions, were present on the Karmann prototype, however.

Porsche’s early quest for a drop-top 911 spawned the innovative targa, and the solution has endured – and evolved – ever since

The problem came into particular focus once feedback arrived on the new 911, reporting the wayward handling of the rear axle on early, short-wheelbase cars.

Any improvements Porsche was to make to the handling needed a rigid bodyshell to work.

Butzi Porsche, Ferry’s son, led the team that took Ferry’s idea and created a styling prototype that resembled the 1967 targa with us here today.

By January 1965 a driving prototype was ready. With the help of both the car’s signature fixed, brushed stainless-steel roll hoop and underbody reinforcements, especially around the A-pillar, it was at least as stiff as the skateboard-chassis 356 roadster.

The Porsche 911 2.0 targa’s lively 2-litre flat-six

Ferry was still entertaining the possibility of a true roadster at the same time, and he commissioned another prototype from Karmann, this time with a 356 Speedster-style roof featuring removable bows.

In September 1965 at the Frankfurt motor show, Porsche unveiled the targa as its solution to an open-top 911 – although production wouldn’t begin at any scale until 1967.

The name came from the Targa Florio, a race Porsche had won four times by 1964, but it had a prescient double meaning, also being the Italian word for a small shield.

This early Porsche 911 targa has noticeable scuttle shake

Ferry’s beloved true cabriolet continued to flounder in the meantime, as body engineers informed him that it would require expensive tooling alterations to produce.

At every turn, be it due to legislative risk, rigidity, tooling costs or the practicality of the roof mechanism, the clear choice was the targa.

As it made its debut in 1967, however, and as this fantastic example from the Porsche Museum of a rare first-production-year car demonstrates, the targa offered virtually all the appeal of a convertible.

Known retrospectively as a ‘soft-window’, the rear section of this early targa’s roof zips in and out of place to be stowed under a fabric cover above the parcel shelf.

The ‘soft-window’ Porsche 911 targa’s fabric roof zips in and out of place

With that and the centre roof section lifted out and stowed in the (front) boot, the experience is near-indistinguishable from that of a true convertible, at least when looking forwards, complete with all the air turbulence of a 1960s roadster.

The only similar design in mass production at the time was the Triumph TR4’s ‘Surrey Top’, a two-piece hardtop with no permanent roll-over bar.

But while it’s the closest to a true convertible in the feeling of openness, it also has the most noticeable scuttle shake: the pillars of the windscreen shudder visibly as the car negotiates poor road surfaces.

After just a couple of years, however, a more prosaic drawback of the targa design was making itself apparent.

The Porsche 911 3.0 Carrera targa’s solid rear ’screen stopped leaks

Because the rear window section had no bows or structure, and was held in tension only by the zipper, it was particularly sensitive to changes in climate.

Below temperatures of 15°C, it shrank so much that it was all but impossible to reattach, and as things got colder still the seams became so stretched they would let water in – in exactly the sort of conditions that owners would be most sensitive to any leaks.

Like all flexible clear-plastic sections, the soft rear window also tended to split and discolour.

All that was of little concern for Californian owners and those in generally warmer climates, so initially Porsche continued to offer the soft-window alongside a new fixed rear glass that was available from 1969, but by 1972 the hooded option had disappeared entirely.

The Porsche 911 3.0 Carrera targa’s wheels and pedals are offset

It’s with this rigid rear window that the term targa has come to be associated – even well beyond Porsche models.

By the time of ‘our’ G-series 1976 Carrera 3.0 targa, the open car had crept up from an initial 15% of 911 production to a massive 43%.

The new solid rear ’screen solved the weather-sealing issues of the soft plastic, and at the same time the roof section above the passenger compartment was lightened.

It immediately feels like a more rigid car to drive, with scuttle shake only present over the roughest of bumps.

This G-series Porsche 911 targa is more rigid than its ‘soft-window’ predecessor

The car does lose a sense of exposure, however: engine noise no longer flows into the cabin quite so readily, and wind buffeting is less pronounced (although that is either a vice or a virtue depending on your persuasion).

Somehow, Porsche managed to make a few backward steps in the ergonomic development of the 911 around this point: the steering wheel and pedals both feel more offset, while the gearshift of the 915 transmission, even though it’s just a beefed-up version of the original 901 gearbox, feels even more of the ‘porridge-stirrer’ stereotype.

The brilliant steering and forward vision remain, though, and while the engine has lost some of its zingy responsiveness in emissions-forced increases in capacity, it’s a much torquier unit, too, with progress up hills being considerably more relaxed.

The Porsche 911 (964) Carrera 2 targa’s improved aero cuts wind noise

Ferry never quite gave up on his desire for a sleeker-looking 911 convertible.

Further fully open prototypes were produced during the 1970s and, once the threat from Capitol Hill had passed, a true 911 Cabriolet arrived in 1982.

The targa continued nonetheless, having established a niche for itself as both the safest and the most refined of ragtops.

When a heated rear window was added to the spec in the mid-’80s, the targa had answered most of the compromises of a traditional convertible.

The 964-generation Porsche 911 was the last targa with a manual roof

The 964-generation 911 of 1989 continued with the model where the G-series left off, its roof arrangement virtually identical.

While the targa top operates no differently from its predecessors, however, the first major redevelopment of the 911 since its inception offers a leap forward in modernity.

Better aerodynamics notably reduce wind noise when the roof is closed, but the biggest change is the gearbox, the G50 introduced on late Carrera 3.2s, which moved the 911 from the bottom set of transmission players to the top.

Gone are the absurdly long throw and spindly lever, replaced by a crisp, satisfying and rapid action.

The Porsche 911 (964) Carrera 2 targa’s gearshift is much better than the G-series’

That puts the 964 in a unique position today as the most modern 911 to use a classic targa arrangement with a manually removable top, because the model was taken off the books in 1993.

For the first couple of years of 1994’s much-altered 993, it was available only as a coupé and Cabriolet – the threat of American legislation had long passed, so Porsche could have set the anachronistic model to one side if all it wanted was a Congress-proof open 911.

Instead, in 1996, there was a reinvention of the targa.

The fundamentals remained the same: fixed rear windows and rear ’screen, with a removable roof between the A- and B-pillar. But, feeling the need to keep pace with the near-universal provision of powered tops at the 911’s price point, the middle section was now glass.

The Porsche 911 (993) is the only air-cooled targa with the ‘greenhouse’ top

Push the roof-opening button and the targa makes use of the 911’s traditional lofty headroom to drop the panel slightly into the car, before it slides back to fit underneath the rear window.

Coupled with Porsche’s Tiptronic gearbox, as here, this 993 targa is as close as a 911 gets to a traditional GT car.

With the roof fully back – really, it’s more like a large sunroof – beams remain above the frameless doors on either side, while a deep wind deflector on the header rail of the windscreen means that when the driver looks up, they largely see plastic rather than sky.

It’s a more refined experience, for sure, moving close to the coupé end of the scale.

The Porsche 911 (993) targa’s flat-six makes 285bhp

It would have felt high-tech in 1996, although the new ‘greenhouse’ set-up has its own drawbacks: there’s still some detectable shake and rattle from the upper body, while rear vision is tricky with the roof back because you have to look through two panes of glass that aren’t quite parallel with each other.

Porsche designed the 993 targa’s top to attach to the same shell as the Cabriolet, in order to save tooling costs and make sure it would carry through to future generations beyond the 993.

When the new, water-cooled 996 series arrived in 1998, however, a significant redesign was required under the skin, and the targa again disappeared for another four years until 2002.

The Porsche 911 (993) targa feels more like a GT car on the road

Owners of 993 targas found that the roof could jam when operated on an uneven surface.

It gained a problematic reputation, so the updated car received both a revised roof mechanism and underbody strengthening.

The rear window also became a useful lifting glass hatch to better access the luggage area.

Out on the road in the 996, the last vestiges of scuttle shake appear finally to have been cured: the new bodyshell feels fantastically rigid, and all the improvements that came with the 996 result in a car that strikes a brilliant balance between competence and playfulness.

The Porsche 911 (996) targa has impressive rigidity

Every ergonomic interaction is spot-on, and while the engine note is not quite as evocative as earlier models’, the 996 has a similar spirit that encourages the driver to explore what it can do, unafraid of approaching its limits.

Prices have been creeping up in recent years, but traditionally, values of targas compared to both coupé and Cabriolet 911s made it clear that, to classic buyers at least, the targa is more select in its appeal.

Having pioneered a halfway house between convertible and coupé means it can never be the best at either one of those things; enthusiasts purchasing a second or third car can afford to be more polarised in their tastes than those who bought them new, presumably as their only set of wheels.

The Porsche 911 (996) targa’s water-cooled flat-six

Many great cars followed the example set by the targa: Porsche’s own 914, the Dino 246GTS, Fiat X1/9, Toyota Supra, Dodge Viper, Honda NSX and, following the further innovation of the T-top in the C3 Chevrolet Corvette, countless more.

Although born of practical necessity – both legislative pressure and the challenge of achieving structural rigidity in the era of the monocoque – the motoring world is richer for the Porsche 911 targa.

Only the Mercedes-Benz SLK series rivals it for sheer innovation in the world of roof removal.

As is Porsche’s modus operandi, the Stuttgart company found a good solution, and has evolved and perfected it, at varying pace, for decades since.

Images: John Wycherley

Thanks to: Porsche GB

Porsche 911 targa: going back to its roots

The classic targa hoop has made a comeback on the 991- and 992-generation Porsche 911

While the 997-generation 911 carried on with a 996-style roof, the targa once again went on a break for a few years with the arrival of the new 991 model in 2011.

When it rejoined the order books in 2014, Porsche unveiled a new targa that attempted to combine the convenience of the ‘greenhouse’ system with the better looks and more open experience of the older targas.

Freed from the restriction of sharing its bodyshell with the Cabriolet, the glass dome of a rear window returned, as did the iconic brushed stainless-steel roll hoop, but now the cloth centre section was power-operated. It stowed in a compartment above the engine beneath a rear-hinged panel that incorporated the rear window.

The same roof style has continued in the 992.

Factfiles

Porsche 911 2.0 targa

Sold/number built 1967-’69/4655
Construction steel monocoque
Engine all-alloy, sohc-per-bank 1991cc flat-six, twin triple-choke Weber IDL carbs
Max power 130bhp @ 6100rpm
Max torque 128lb ft @ 4200rpm
Transmission four-speed manual, optional five-speed manual or four-speed semi-automatic from 1968, RWD
Suspension independent, at front by struts, longitudinal torsion bars rear semi-trailing arms, transverse torsion bars; telescopic dampers f/r
Steering rack and pinion
Brakes discs, with servo
Length 13ft 8in (4163mm)
Width 5ft 3in (1610mm)
Height 4ft 4in (1320mm)
Wheelbase 7ft 3in (2211mm)
Weight 2380lb (1080kg)
0-60mph 9.1 secs
Top speed 130mph
Mpg 29
Price new DM22,380 (1967)
Price now £60-240,000*