The history of Porsche paint

The earliest 356s were bodied by Reutter in Stuttgart, and for the first few years the colors were catalogued by Reutter's numbers, not Porsche's. Black was 501. Fish Silver Grey was 505. Adria Blue was 509. A buyer in 1951 chose from roughly a dozen shades, and the paint under them was nitrocellulose lacquer — Nitrolack — sprayed in three or four coats and polished by hand.

In 1954 Porsche started issuing its own four-digit codes in parallel with Reutter's, and switched the standard finish to synthetic enamel, Kunstharzlack. Nitrolack stayed on the books, but only if you asked for it specially.

What's striking about these first charts is how unafraid they are. Radium Green, Strawberry Red, Terra Cotta, Palm Green, Pascha Red. This is a company building a few hundred cars a year for people who had already decided to be conspicuous.

Special paints. Same cars, higher price. It is the first time the factory formally admits that color is a product rather than a finish, and the names get more evocative to match: Meissen Blue after the porcelain, Fjord Green, Auratium Green, Aquamarine, Ruby Red.

The palette stays deliberately narrow — eleven or twelve shades a year through the early sixties — but it turns cooler and more considered than the 356's first decade. Heron Grey, Pearl Grey and Glacier White set a template for restrained Porsche greys that the company is still drawing on sixty years later.

Meanwhile something else was starting in the service bay. In 1955 the industrialist Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach asked the Zuffenhausen repair shop to fit a rear windscreen wiper to his 356 A. It was an odd request at the time, and it worked, and other customers heard about it.

This is the single sharpest discontinuity in the whole dataset, and it isn't gradual — it happens in one model year. The 911 has arrived, the company is growing fast, and a sports car aimed at a wider, younger, richer audience needs a wardrobe rather than a uniform.

The new names are warmer and more places-and-things than the fifties: Bahama Yellow, Aga Blue, Irish Green, Polo Red, Sand Beige, Sepia Brown. Gulf Blue appears as a deep, saturated blue years before anyone associates the word Gulf with a petrol company's racing livery.

Bahama Yellow in particular — a caramelly, almost non-metallic gold — became the look of the long-hood 911 and was only offered for a handful of years.

The counts peak here — forty-four paints on offer in 1974 — but the counts undersell it. What changes in the early seventies is the *saturation*. These are not tasteful colors. Viper Green is frog-bright. Signal Orange is a ripe pumpkin. Rose Red and Magenta are closer to fashion than to cars.

Rennbow's editors put the mindset plainly: before the mid-seventies, a Porsche owner in one of these colors was shouting at the rest of the road that they were an individual and the car proved it. Porsche was still a small sports car company and didn't have to take itself too seriously.

Color also stopped being just the body. The 1972 Carrera RS 2.7 was usually delivered in Grand Prix White with CARRERA script down the flanks in blue, red, green or black — and the wheel centres painted to match. A spec, not a shade.

Porsche's own historians date the shift to the F-model giving way to the G-model: from 1975 the colors got calmer, darker, more sedate, and the shrill candy finishes found less and less appreciation. Two forces pushed the same way. Buyers had started thinking about what the car would be worth later, and the palette now had to suit a four-cylinder 924 and a big grand tourer in the 928 as well as a 911.

By the mid-eighties the count bottoms out at twenty-six shades a year — barely more than 1966 — and two colors effectively become the brand. Guards Red arrives in 1974 and is still orderable today, the longest continuous run of any paint in the catalogue. Grand Prix White covers 1971 to 1996.

The special-order side, meanwhile, was industrialising. The Sonderwunsch department was formally created in 1978 under Rolf Sprenger to handle requests that had outgrown the repair shop. In 1983 it built Mansour Ojjeh a road-going 935 with 409 PS, a Flachbau nose and Creme Caramel leather; the Flachbau became a small series. In 1986 the whole operation was reconstituted as Porsche Exclusive.

Signal Green. Maritime Blue. Mint Green. Coral Red Metallic. Violet Blue Metallic. Tahoe Blue Metallic. Rubystone Red. Speed Yellow lands in 1993, Riviera Blue and Amaranth Violet for the final two model years. On paper it is the boldest palette since 1974.

The take rates were close to nothing. The 968 Register's North American figures for the coupé run: Speed Yellow ten cars, Maritime Blue eight, Riviera Blue one, Rubystone none, Signal Green none. The cabriolet numbers are barely better. Porsche put the colors on the chart; buyers ticked black, silver and Guards Red.

Which is exactly why these are the paints people now chase. Rarity was manufactured accidentally, by indifference, thirty years ago.

The 993 launched with the range cut hard: eighteen colors for the 964 in model year 1993 became twelve for the new car. Amethyst, Cobalt Blue, Horizon Blue, Oak Green, Violet Blue and Amazon Green all came off the standard list. If you still wanted one, you paid for a special order.

That is the quiet turning point on this whole page. Color moves from something included to something sold, and the special-order programme stops being a curiosity for the very rich and starts being a real product line.

What filled the gap was silver, and a lot of it. Arctic Silver, Polar Silver, GT Silver, Seal Grey, Atlas Grey, Agate Grey, Basalt Black. Even Porsche's own press cars tell the story: the factory liked Pastel Yellow for 996 and Boxster photography because it shot well in almost any light, and customers hardly ever ordered it.

The range explodes because the company does — Cayenne, Panamera, Boxster, Cayman and 911 all want their own character — and because motorsport colors come back onto the road cars. The GT3 RS turns high-visibility paint with contrasting script into a signature, and suddenly a loud color is a badge of intent rather than a lapse of taste.

Lava Orange arrives on the 991 GT3 RS and spreads to the 718 and the Cayenne. Miami Blue and Racing Yellow follow. Orange had effectively left the standard chart after Continental Orange ended in 1979; it comes back as the most photographed color Porsche makes.

Markets start pulling in different directions too. Mahogany Metallic — dark, red-leaning, heavily flaked — becomes the third most popular color in China after white and grey, while European and American buyers stay overwhelmingly on black, white and grey.

Custom Color becomes Paint to Sample: a bank of shades already technically approved by the paint engineers, orderable through a dealer. More than a hundred extra colors for the 911 and 718, more than fifty for Panamera, Macan and Cayenne, sixty-five for the Taycan. Maritime Blue, Rubystar and Mint Green — the colors nobody bought in 1993 — are officially reinstated. It adds roughly three months to delivery.

Above it sits Paint to Sample Plus, where you submit a sample and Porsche develops a color for you. Porsche Exclusive had already been renamed Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur in 2017; the pieces now line up into a proper ladder from standard chart to one-off.

The series colors get braver at the same time, and in two directions at once. Ultraviolet, Lizard Green, Voodoo Blue and the extraordinary Python Green Chromaflair go one way. The Taycan deliberately goes the other, with Frozen Blue, Frozen Berry, Neptune Blue and Coffee Beige — pastels, chosen to make an electric Porsche feel like a different kind of object.

A series color normally takes several years to develop. Painted panels are left under sunlight for twenty-four months and attacked with things like wheel cleaner to see what survives. Red needs a red primer underneath it. Yellow has to be watched carefully around the door pillars, where pigment distribution goes wrong first — and it has to still match the rest of the car after years of sun.

For Paint to Sample Plus, simulation and computerised mixing benches have compressed that down to about six months. At least one complete test body is built and sprayed before your actual car is, so the engineers can see how the pigment lands on every curve and shut line.

The current chart carries that history openly. Shore Blue on the 911 S/T's 60-years Heritage package, Ruby Star Neo reworking a 1990s pink, Shade Green and Cartagena Yellow as special colors, Oak Green and Slate Grey returning as Neo versions of seventies and sixties shades. Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur now lists around a thousand predefined options, and Paint to Sample Plus is regularly the single most expensive line on a configurator.