Why Was the 90s' Biggest Porsche Tuner Killed By Gangsters?
Donut Media
Here's an entertaining little tale about cars, financial skulduggery and murder. I had never heard of Uwe Gemballa or his cars before, but that's not surprising. Back in the 80's and 90's I pretty much had my nose to the grindstone and didn't have the time or inclination to follow automobile fashion. Still, fancy, high performance cars were a thing back then, and if you look back at the 20th Century, it has always been a thing, well, for as long as there have been cars.
If you look at the entire history of the automobile, there must have been somewhere north of a zillion fancy, high performance cars produced, so what happened to them? Well, some of them ended up in the scrap heap, and some of them are occupying obscure corners of dilapidated barns, but a bunch of them were stored away in private garages, museums and warehouses, which makes me wonder how much warehouse space is devoted to these cars. If you figure there are a million cars squirreled away and you figure 200 square feet per car, that's like eight square miles of storage space. If the fancy car habit keeps growing exponentially like it has been, how long before the entire planet is covered with automobile storage? Reminds me of Cemetery World by Clifford D. Simak, a science fiction story that posits that in the far future Earth is just one big graveyard.
I've never liked Porsches. I am not sure why. It could be envy, except I like Italian exotics just fine and they are even more expensive than Porsches. The only reason I can come up with is that their engines are buried in the back. American muscle cars have the engine up front and when you open the hood all the glory of the engine is on display. You open the rear deck on a Porsche and all you see is a grimy mess of wires and widgets. No, no Porsches for me.
I'm not quite sure what qualities I am looking for in a video to make it a worth posting here. I suspect it's about 50% the quality of the video and 50% what kind of mood I am in. In other word's, it's a crap shoot.
No worry about too much storage being gobbled up by high-end exotics. One of the tactics of those rich-boy toys is not make as many as they could sell. Make it a status just to be chosen, after you have the money of course. After all Ferrari has only built 220,000 cars since 1947 and that's a high profile name everyone knows. Many names we haven't and probably never will hear, they're just whispered among the in crowd. No, Pep Boys won't have parts.
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