The Porsche 944 Turbo Is an Underrated Old-School Porsche

This is a 1988 Porsche 944 Turbo and it's a rare and special Porsche that nobody ever really talks about. Everybody's obsessed with the Porsche 911 from this era but the 944 Turbo has sort of flown under the radar. And today I'm going to review this rare and special Porsche. Before I get started I should point out that this 944 Turbo was purchased by the current owner on Cars and Bids which is my enthusiast car auction website for cool cars from the modern era. This 944 Turbo sold recently for $54,000 with just over 20,000 miles in excellent condition, a very special and exciting car purchased on Cars and Bids. And if you're looking to buy a cool enthusiast car from the modern era, Cars and Bids is the place to do it with daily auctions and great selection of cool cars like this 944 Turbo. Check it out at CarsandBids.com. So let's talk 944 Turbo. The 944 was Porsche's entry-level model throughout the 1980s much like the Boxster and Cayman are today. Although the vast majority of 944s were standard models there was also a high performance version the 944 Turbo which was made for a few years. That's this car and it had a big power boost and some other upgrades compared to a standard 944. And today I'm going to show you. First I'll take you on a thorough tour of the 944 Turbo and show you its quirks and features. Then I'll get it out on the road and drive it and then I'll give it a Doug's score. All right I'm gonna start the quirks and features the 944 Turbo with a little overview about this car before I get into its many rather interesting and weird quirks. So the 944 first came out in the early 1980s. They always used four-cylinder engines. By the mid-80s it had about 150 horsepower and that's when Porsche came out with this the 944 Turbo which is code named the 951 in the Porsche world. Now the Turbo used the same four-cylinder as the regular base model 944 but it added a turbocharger for more power. The result was 220 horses which doesn't sound like much but it was a 50% increase over the base car which was a huge power boost. And magazines at the time were getting 0 to 60 in the high five low six second range which was pretty good for a car like this in this period. So this was the performance model that you really wanted. But anyway let's talk weird quirks and features. Let's start with the key which you can see is just a simple old-school car key except it has one single button on it. That button was not lock or unlock instead you pressed it and it turned on this little light here next to the key part itself. The theory was that light would help illuminate the door handle the key lock on the car if it was dark and you were trying to see where to stick the key. Pretty amazing to see that and amazing to see that it still works. But speaking of the door handle you will notice that it has the Porsche script imprinted on it. Very subtle but also very cool little detail on the outside of this car. The Porsche script is also found in the back in this very 1980s wide lettering along the whole rear of the car so you could certainly tell it was a Porsche from the back. Very period correct. And by the way speaking of cool badging on this car you can see the turbo badge on the back in that very Porsche font they're always using for their model names. But you also have that turbo logo on the door sill. You can see it here raised lettering on the side. It's both subtle and cool at the same time and it's a neat little badge you get to see every time you open the door to your 944 turbo. But anyway you climb inside the 944 turbo and you quickly discover there are a lot of rather weird 1980s quirks inside this interior. Probably my very favorite is the trip odometer reset button. Okay check this out. You look in the center you get your climate controls and you have the little switches on the climate controls that you can use to move around where the air is positioned. Pretty simple. But you also have one of these switches on this small climate control in the middle which seems kind of odd. And indeed it is odd because that's actually your trip odometer reset button. You push that and it resets the trip odometer. That is not a climate vent switch. It is a dummy made to look like one. And I guess to clean up the interior and make it so you don't have some ugly trip odometer reset button instead it just looks like part of the climate vents. Pretty crazy. And also crazy in here is the control for the power mirrors. You have this little dial on the driver's door panel. You can move around and you can see it adjusts the driver's side power mirror which is pretty standard and it makes sense. But how do you adjust the passenger side power mirror? You don't have a similar dial over on the passenger side and even if you did wouldn't be helpful because the driver couldn't use it. So what do you do? The answer is there's this switch in the center console that allows you to change which mirror you're adjusting. So if you push the switch then go back over to the driver's door panel and move that little dial. Well then you're adjusting the passenger side power mirror and you can move the switch again and go back to adjusting the driver's side power mirror. Having a switch to change which mirror you're adjusting, not all that weird, but putting the switch so far away from the actual mirror control is absolutely bizarre. And speaking of strange controls in this car, how about the one for the power sunroof which is also located here in the center console. And you can see the control shows the car with a massive arrow pointing down to close the sunroof or with a massive arrow pointing up to open the sunroof. Although that control greatly overstates what the sunroof can actually do which is open up to vent about two inches. That's the entire movement of the sunroof in this car. It really just opens up barely. You don't get any air, doesn't slide back. That's all the sunroof does in here. Amazingly for that small purpose there are still five separate latches and hinges on the front part of the sunroof as you can see to keep it in place. It almost looks like there should be a convertible top in this car that you unlatch and then push back but instead you just have a sunroof that opens up two inches and you still have five latches which is pretty classic German over-engineering. Now as for the climate controls, they don't suffer from that problem. They are simple, they are basic, easy to use and figure out. Although there is one rather odd climate control and that would be this little switch here. In between the center climate vents you push this up to direct air to your windshield for the defogger or you push it back down to direct air to these climate vents. It's not like modern cars where you have some button you press and then the climate vents do their thing automatically in the background. Here you were manually moving the vents up or down yourself with that little slider. Also another rather interesting control in here is the parking brake which is not mounted in the center console like it was in so many cars from this era. Instead it's between the driver's seat and the driver's door. Now you'd think this wouldn't be incredibly convenient if the parking brake is on but it doesn't really come up all that high so it doesn't make it harder for you to get in or out of the car but that's where it is which is certainly a strange placement. Also a strange placement in this car the power window switches which you can see are located here directly next to each other on a vertical surface rather than side by side on a horizontal surface so it's not exactly easy to figure out which switch controls which window but that's where they are and in fact the one closer to you controls the driver window and the one further controls the passenger window. Now it's worth pointing out that having power windows in this car was a pretty cool thing in the 80s. Not all cars like this had them but this did and it had power mirrors like I already showed you. It also had power locks. You can press this button and lock the doors which was nice. This car also had a power sunroof like I showed you. Didn't do much but it was there and it was power operated so this car was pretty well equipped especially for its time but the 944 turbo's biggest claim to fame when it came to equipment was dual airbags. This car came standard with dual airbags driver and passenger and it was the first production car ever to come standard with dual airbags. That happened when the 944 turbo first came out in 1986 and obviously after that airbags permeated the car industry and by the mid 90s they were required here in North America but this is the first car ever to have both standard. And in fact one interesting thing with this car being an early airbag adopter it doesn't have an airbag warning label printed on the sun visor which became government mandated even to this day. All cars have an airbag warning label on the sun visor but not this one. Instead that warning label is on the inside of the glove box. You can see it here giving similar information but differently placed because that regulation hadn't came to be yet and by the way you will also notice this warning label is still wrapped in its original plastic which really speaks to the tremendous condition of this car. Like I said this is a very original 944 turbo with only a little over 20,000 miles. It's tremendously well kept and rare to see one in this condition now so I'm thrilled to be able to review it. But anyway next up another interesting quirk of this car the gauge cluster which actually looks fairly standard nothing too unusual or interesting here except that there is a massive exclamation point right in the center of everything. This big exclamation point here was intended to be a warning and it would turn on if there was something it wanted to alert you to. So you'd be driving along you'd see the exclamation point and then you would look further into the gauge cluster and see what it was telling you. For example if I put on the parking brake you can see the exclamation comes on but also the parking brake warning light comes on so both things illuminate to kind of make it clearer that there's something you should be paying attention to which is kind of weird but that's what they did. Now also in the gauge cluster you can see this decal that says unleaded fuel only. Surely the factory put on these decals to remind people not to put in leaded gas which I guess you could still get back when this car came out. It's crazy to see that decal still there still preserved making this car feel tremendously original. Also original in here is the stereo this old school Blaupunkt stereo with cassette player would have either been put in aftermarket or from the factory in this car I'm not sure which but it certainly fits certainly perfectly period correct for this 944. And in case you wanted to play some cassettes well you could store them in your center console. Open up the center console and you can see a whole cassette storage area in here. No extra storage space for your sunglasses or paperwork it was all devoted to cassettes which seems about right for this car at this time period. Also another thing in this car that feels tremendously original is in the glove box. You pop open the owner's manual pouch and you will discover this is the owner's manual spiral notebook bound owner's manual for this car which just seems crazy. That is not how it's done today but that's how it was done back in the 80s. Porsche was quite clearly a very different company back then with this old school very basic owner's manual. Now another way in this car that you can tell that Porsche was a different company when this car was being made is the placement of the key which is to the right of the steering wheel like on most normal cars. Doesn't seem that weird unless you're familiar with Porsches and you know that other Porsches have the key to the left of the steering wheel. Porsche does this as a nod to their racing heritage. Back in the day at the famous Le Mans car race the drivers would run to their cars as fast as possible and Porsche felt that putting the key on the left made it easier to start up the car put it in gear with your right hand and get going. And so to this day Porsche keys are on the left even if you buy a base four-cylinder Macan with 17-inch wheels. But the key is on the right in this particular car and that's interesting but not surprising because this car was not originally developed to be a Porsche. The 944 is based on the Porsche 924 which came out before it in the mid-70s and that was co-developed by Porsche and Volkswagen and the thought at the time was that it would become an Audi. That was the original plan and Porsche was going to have a version of the car but by the time it got to market Porsche took things over and the 924 debuted solely as a Porsche although it did use an Audi powertrain which was pretty controversial at the time and it also had the key on the right because Volkswagen and Audi models would have had their keys there. Eventually Porsche went back to the drawing board and heavily revised the 924. They put in their own engine they changed the bodywork and they created the 944. This car which was a lot more Porsche but it still kept the Volkswagen Audi key placement from the original car. But anyway next up we move on to the back seat of the 944 turbo. Yes this car has back seats. No it was not to fool the insurance companies, the greatest car enthusiast myth ever. Instead it was for short trips or short people. They're very small and I will try to stuff myself into the back seats now. This really was not made for me. You can see the back seats have this sort of bucket design along the base and larger people can't get in at all. It was totally for children. Even if you could fit your butt in as an adult which is difficult you probably couldn't get the front seats back into place. These back seats were really made for short people and again on very short trips. Now you can see the back seats in this car are completely no frills. Nothing interesting or exciting or cool back here except for you do have speakers on either side of the back seat. But that's it. They are basic, they are small, they are meant for you to just sit there and deal with it until you've reached your destination. One interesting thing about the back seats is how they mounted the seat belts. You can see they just kind of tacked them on to the side of the seats. This was before three-point seat belts were required so you just had lap belts back here. Pretty simple just stuck onto the seat bottoms. Again no frills in these back seats. But anyway next we move on to the cargo area of the 944 Turbo and one impressive thing about this car is you can actually open the cargo hatch from the interior. You have this little button in the driver's footwell. You press that and it'll pop open the rear tailgate. This is not rare or special or interesting by modern standards but in the 80s most cars wouldn't open their tailgates or their trunk unless you came to the back and stuck the key in and open it from there. So having a release in the car was actually a pretty big deal. But you can also open it with the key as I shall do now. You twist it and then the glass lifts up revealing the cargo area of the 944. Now you can see it is very wide and very flat back here. There's really a lot of space for you to stick stuff. Obviously not tremendously deep, not very tall. You can't be carrying around an armoire in your 944 but you do have pretty decent cargo storage back here. And you will also notice in this cargo area that there's actually a little hump preventing it from being completely flat. Under the carpet you can see this hump here and that is the spare tire. They stuck it in as best they could to try to make the floor as flat as possible but it still sticks out the little spare tire hump in the cargo area of the 944. Now interestingly to access the spare tire you can pull up the carpet by undoing some snaps that keep it in place. You pull off these snaps one by one and then you can get the carpet up which is very weird by modern standards. Most carpets have like a little latch you pull and then it can just lift up but not here. It was snapped in place to the inside of the trunk and getting under the carpet meant unsnapping it. It's kind of interesting. And by the way one other notable item with the storage space back here just in case that hump takes up a little too much room for your item you can put down the rear seat backrest. You just push on this button as you can see and then it folds forward and creates a little bit of a larger load space back here for bigger items. Of course it compromises the rear seats but they were already compromised anyway. But since I'm around back let's talk about maybe the most interesting item back here which would be the rear glass which you can see is curved in a very interesting very distinctive way that was very much unique to these Porsche models. It was basically the entire rear of the car including over the sides all this one piece of curved glass that again was very distinctly 944 and 924 the car that came before this and 968 the one that came after. Now beyond its shape a few other interesting notable items with the rear glass. One is that it integrates the rear spoiler which is actually rubber. You can see it here it also has a distinctive look on this car but you probably wouldn't know it's rubber unless you actually went up and felt it. You can see it is indeed a rubber substance rather than plastic or metal like you might expect. And this rear spoiler incorporates the Porsche script into it very subtle but imprinted in the rubber in the center facing back it says Porsche which is something I hadn't noticed before on 944s and it's kind of a cool little detail. Now also in this rear glass you will see the rear wiper it's located here and mounted directly on the rear glass with the wiper motor mounted directly below it. Not exactly the most beautiful integration but it was a different time and at least it has a plastic covering over it. You also have the third brake light back here which again is just sort of tacked on in place. That's because the 944 came out in the early 1980s before most governments had third brake light mandates. That came during the car's production run so they had to figure out a way to incorporate a third brake light and they just sort of stuck it on the glass. Now speaking of regulations in this car one thing you'll notice from the back of the 944 is the rear bumper which kind of sticks out in a rather ugly way. It's weird to see just how much it protrudes from the back of the car. That is due to North American bumper regulations that were coming into play in the 1980s and there are quite a few cars that had kind of sticky Audi bumpers that didn't look so good because of those regs. Now interestingly with the 944 you don't see that up front. You did on the earlier 944 models. You can see here the bumper sticks out just like it does in back and it doesn't really look that great but with the 944 turbo Porsche was able to redesign the front end and integrate the bumper into the design and style of the car which made it look nicer. They eventually incorporated that front end into other non-turbo 944s as well. Now on the subject of upgrades that the turbo model had and the regular 944 didn't another major one was wheels. You can see these wheels are actually upgrades even though they look pretty small they're not exactly beautiful. The turbo had 16 inch wheels compared to the standard 944 which had 15. These were called the phone dial wheels because they kind of resembled an old school rotary phone dial and that's what the 944 turbo came with. But anyway since I'm on the outside of the 944 let's talk over a couple of other notable exterior details one of which is the fenders which are just plain cool. These wide fenders that look neat. A lot of cool 80s performance cars had fenders like this and the 944 was one of them. Very much emblematic of its era but also gave it this cool special look that's really coming back into vogue. Also worth pointing out on the outside you can see the rocker panels have kind of a different finish from the rest of the car. Still red but different texture and that's because these are for rock protection. They're designed to protect the paint better against rock chips so if stuff comes up from the wheels and hits it it won't damage the paint quite as easily as if it was the normal finish. And of course the other notable item on the outside of this car was the headlights. You have these old school pop-up headlights you can see them here turn the lights on they pop right up eagerly which was a wonderful design touch of cars from this era. Very distinctive very 1980s and the 944 has them these cool old school pop-up headlights. But anyway next we move under the hood and you can see the engine like I said 2.5 liter four-cylinder turbocharged so in this car it made about 220 horsepower which again doesn't seem like all that much but the standard car was making about 150 without the turbocharger and this car only weighs about 3100-ish pounds so 220 horsepower was a pretty decent figure and again sent this car 0 to 60 in under six seconds which really wasn't so bad. By the way one cool touch I wanted to point out with this engine you can see the Porsche script is right there and the metal on the engine cast in with it looks really cool and directly above that you have the firing order 1342 also cast into the metal and looks very cool. Now it's worth pointing out that in addition to the extra power that the turbo models got there were also quite a few other upgrades to make them sportier and better than the standard 944. The turbos got better suspension little stiffer springs they got better brakes that were actually borrowed from the 911 a little bit bigger for better stopping power the turbo models got those bigger wheels that I mentioned earlier and showed you they also got improved cooling for the transmission and the engine and they got an upgraded transmission so it was a little bit more robust than what you had in the standard 944. So quite a few other upgrades in addition to the more power for the turbo models. Now it's worth pointing out this is a 1988 model and later in the 88 model year Porsche came out with an even more powerful turbo 944 called the Turbo S. That version had 250 horsepower and even more significant upgrades beyond that again to the suspension the brakes and other systems in the car. Now after the 88 model year after this car all 944 turbos got the additional upgrades from the Turbo S so the Turbo S became the standard 944 turbo after 1988 so later 944 turbos had even more benefits than this car did over the standard model and since the late production 944 turbo models had gained more power Porsche also gave more power to the standard model the regular 944 was boosted in power to the point where the final version of the regular 944 had about 210 horsepower just under and so it became a more powerful vehicle too especially compared to the measly 150 horsepower or less that was standard in the earlier models before. Also worth pointing out that later production 944 models got larger engines in fact by the end these cars were using a three liter four-cylinder an absolutely massive four-cylinder engine but that's what they had in the 944 to help it get that extra power near the end of its production run. And so those are the quirks and features of the Porsche 944 turbo now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives. All right driving the 944 turbo I haven't driven the 944 in an enormously long amount of time and I've never driven a turbo and I have now spent maybe 30 miles in this car which is a lot considering it only has 20,000 miles on it and I gotta say I'm pretty impressed with a couple aspects of it the biggest being that it feels so good. Old Porsches are really hot right now everybody's super into them it's they they're massively exciting and valuable market segment and they're really big but a lot of the focus has been on the 911 and not as much focus has been on cars like this the 944 and sort of the lesser Porsche models and when you see that you start to think oh well maybe they're not as good as the 911 maybe they kind of suck and driving this car around for an hour or so I gotta say I don't really feel that way I've spent a lot of time in older Porsche models I've owned a couple and I've driven a ton a ton of them and one of the interesting things I've learned is they drive amazingly and I have to say that I think that that driving experience from older 911s, 964s and 993s translates quite well to the 944 it really does drive great and that means a fantastic clutch action very smooth very easy no springiness very linear travel very easy to figure out also a great gear selector very nice feels great not shooting into gear and I really love to play around with it but there's a lot more to this car than just that another thing that's really awesome about it is it's fast it's legitimately really really fast now 0 to 60 at the time was reported like I said to be just under six seconds like high fives with this car which doesn't feel all that fast but when you're in a little car like this and when you have an old school turbocharged engine that just kind of waits to spool up and then rockets you forward it can actually feel pretty quick and that is what I feel about this car it really rockets you forward and it feels exceptionally quick now it's not like a lightning rod it's not some brand new supercar but it feels a lot quicker than than I expected and that solves one of the drawbacks one of the complaints I've always had about the 944 which is that it feels kind of slow I mean the car early on only had 150 or less horsepower later it was up to like 200 but it never really felt all that fast but sitting here in this turbo it does and it's worth pointing out that this particular 944 turbo is basically unmodified except it has a little engine tune that bumps up power to around 250 which is where the turbo s was and then the later turbo model so this kind of has the performance of a later 944 turbo and it really does feel quick it's fun it's exciting it's surprising how fast this car is the other thing worth pointing out that's interesting and good about this car is the way that it handles also quite impressive this was always a big thing with 944s people would always say the 944 is one of the best handling cars in its day yes the 911 the 928 were sort of the flagships of the Porsche model range but the 944 was really the zippy exciting handling one and that does feel true and I have to say all the 944s I've driven prior to this have been kind of ratty and rougher models and this one in 20,000 miles in really nice shape you get this sense of what people were talking about you can just kind of toss it around and feel very confident in your decision and the power is just enough that you can floor it coming out of a corner and feel like you're really going but also not like you're going to crash or spin out or violate any speed limits crazily this is a really a well-balanced car and I have to say I think it's a better car than the standard 944 people are going to roll their eyes and say well of course it is it's the turbo one but you'll get some purists who will tell you no the 944 was intended to be naturally aspirated and the 200 horsepower is the right number for it I don't agree with that especially after driving both now the turbo really does add an element to this car that makes it even more enjoyable the standard car already had the handling and the excitement going around corners but here now you have some extra power that makes it even better truthfully this car is underrated that's kind of the thrust of the video it was intended to be and driving it and in experiencing it for the day I feel even more confident in that assessment the car just doesn't get as much love as it should frankly I feel the same way about the Boxster and to a lesser extent the Cayman I think those are very special cars that people look over as sort of the entry Porsches when you really want a 911 and I think people do that here too but they shouldn't this is an exceptional car it drives well it's fun it's exciting and the turbo version is pretty fast and I just think there's a lot to love here and a lot of old school Porsche that people love is integrated into this car even though it isn't a vaunted 911 or 911 turbo or 928 GTS and so that's the Porsche 944 turbo this is a special car rare with low production numbers and it's pretty thrilling to drive and frankly it's kind of a bargain considering that even a regular standard 911 from this car's era will sell for two to three times what this car will the 944 turbo is a fun rather obscure Porsche and now it's time to give this one a Doug's score and the Doug's score is here 49 out of 100 which puts the 944 turbo here against other 80s and early 90s sports cars the 944 turbo is an interesting one the driving experience is pretty impressive with good handling and good acceleration but it's dragged down a bit in terms of status and coolness by the fact that it's just a 944 still it's a fun sports car and frankly I think it's a bit undervalued that the market is starting to wake up to these old Porsches that aren't 911s