The Wedge Shaped Porsche That Never Was

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A transcript, cleaned up via AI and edited by a staffer, is below.

[Image: YouTube Screenshot]

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Transcript:

In the long and occasionally bewildering history of Porsche, there are cars that define the brand: the 356, the 911, and the 917.

And then, hiding in the shadows, there are machines that make you pause, rub your eyes, and say, “Wait—Porsche built that?” One of those machines is the Porsche Tapiro.

Dreamed up in 1970 by Giorgetto Giugiaro—arguably the Leonardo da Vinci of car design—the Tapiro was a bold wedge-shaped supercar that looked less like anything from Stuttgart and more like something from outer space. And yet, under its angular skin sat a proper Porsche heart.

The Tapiro was built by Italdesign, Giugiaro’s newly formed design studio, just two years after he set out on his own. Porsche, eager to explore what the future of sports cars might look like, lent the studio a 914/6 chassis and essentially told them to have fun.

The result was a car that simultaneously stunned audiences at the 1970 Turin Auto Show and left purists scratching their heads. If the 911 represented Porsche continuity, the Tapiro was the opposite. It was radical, aggressive, and uncompromisingly modern.

But to understand the Tapiro, you have to understand the design language of the early 1970s. This was the era when supercars stopped being curvy, sensual machines and started looking like kitchen appliances that could slice your leg off.

Giugiaro was at the forefront of this new aesthetic. Just two years earlier he had penned the Bizzarrini Manta, which introduced the world to his wedge obsession. A year later he would design the Maserati Boomerang. In between came the Tapiro, a car that applied the wedge philosophy to Porsche mechanicals.

The Tapiro looked nothing like the 914 donor car it was based on. Gone were the rounded panels and the targa roof. Instead, the body was carved into hard geometric lines. The nose was sharp and low, with pop-up headlights set flush into the bonnet. The cabin resembled a glasshouse, with flat planes forming a near-perfect trapezoid.

Then there were the party-piece gullwing doors. While Mercedes may have popularized the idea in the 1950s, Giugiaro reinterpreted it for the modern age. It was theater on hinges.

From some angles, the car bore a passing resemblance to the De Tomaso Mangusta. Both shared a dramatic wedge shape, a mid-engine layout, and the sense that the front end could cut a block of cheese. But where the Mangusta was a snarling Italian brute, the Tapiro had a German backbone. It felt restrained, engineered, and just a little clinical.

This car wasn’t just a styling exercise. Beneath the fiberglass bodywork was genuine Porsche hardware worth paying attention to.

Italdesign used the Porsche 914/6 chassis. The 914 had been Porsche’s attempt to create an affordable entry-level sports car developed with Volkswagen. In four-cylinder form it was sometimes dismissed as the “Volkswagen Porsche,” but the six-cylinder version was a different animal, fitted with the same flat-six engine found in the 911T.

For the Tapiro, Porsche supplied a 2.4-liter air-cooled flat-six. This was no meek little motor. It was tuned to produce around 220 horsepower at a screaming 7,800 rpm. It was a proper thoroughbred, paired with a five-speed manual gearbox sending power to the rear wheels in the traditional Porsche way.

Italdesign claimed the car could reach 152 mph, a figure that in 1970 put it in the same league as Ferrari and Lamborghini. In other words, the Tapiro was playing with the big boys.

The chassis retained the 914’s mid-engine layout, meaning handling was balanced, nimble, and more forgiving than the tail-happy 911s of the era. Suspension was fully independent, with MacPherson struts at the front and trailing arms at the rear, while four-wheel disc brakes provided stopping power.

In other words, beneath its radical appearance, the Tapiro was still fundamentally Porsche—engineered for precision rather than drama.

After its debut at the Turin Auto Show in 1970, the Tapiro was shipped to the United States, where it appeared at the Los Angeles Imported Automobile and Sports Car Show in 1971. There it wowed American audiences who were more accustomed to Mustangs and Camaros than futuristic European wedges.

But unlike many concept cars that disappear into storage after a show tour, the Tapiro found a second life. In 1972, Italdesign sold the car to a Spanish industrialist who, remarkably, decided to use it as his daily driver. Imagine popping to the shops in a one-off Italdesign Porsche concept with gullwing doors.

Unfortunately, the story didn’t end happily.

The Tapiro was almost entirely destroyed after a fire consumed it. The exact cause remains debated. Some sources claim labor activists set the car on fire in protest against the owner’s business practices, while others say it was simply an accident.

Whatever the truth, the result was the same: the Tapiro was reduced to a charred shell.

Italdesign later recovered the remains and displayed the burned hulk in the Giugiaro Museum—a haunting reminder of what had once been one of the most forward-thinking Porsche experiments ever built.

So why remember the Tapiro today?

Because it’s a reminder of what happens when Porsche steps outside its comfort zone. Every now and then the brand flirts with radical ideas: the 959, the Carrera GT, the Mission X concept. But most of the time Porsche refines the same formula.

The Tapiro was different. It was Porsche interpreted by an outsider, stripped of tradition and rebuilt in a new design language.

Even in its burned and ruined state, the Tapiro tells a story of experimentation, risk, and a moment when Porsche could have gone in an entirely different direction. And while the 911’s continuity has kept the brand strong, part of you can’t help but wonder what might have happened if Stuttgart had leaned further into the mid-engine wedge.