A 1953 Porsche 356 limousine just surfaced on Bring a Trailer. No, Porsche never built such a thing. Somebody with more audacity than reverence did.
The car was commissioned in 2001 by the late John Dixon of Dayton, Ohio, a collector whose taste in Porsches ran from the sacred to the absurd. Dixon’s collection, which he called the Taj Ma Garaj, included a 356A Carrera GT Speedster that sold for well over a million dollars after his passing. He also owned multiple Porsche tractors. The limo was ordered for his daughter’s wedding.
Two 356 bodies were sacrificed and stitched together with an enormous amount of custom metalwork. The result is a white, coach-doored, glass-partitioned limousine powered by a carburetted 1.6-liter flat-four sourced from a Porsche 912. That engine, even when fresh, made just under 100 horsepower. This is not a car that arrives in a hurry.
The man behind the build was Don Boeke, known in Midwest custom circles as The Egyptian, a nickname earned not from any pharaonic ambition but from his hometown of Egypt, Ohio. Boeke was a painter and fabricator whose work drew motorcycle and car enthusiasts from across the region. The 356 limo, finished in wedding white over tan leatherette, represents some of his finest execution.
The interior features a roomy rear bench, the kind of accommodations Porsche never intended for a car originally designed to weigh less than a dishwasher.
The mechanical layout is pure 356, which means the engine sits behind the rear axle and the four-speed manual gearbox routes through a transaxle out back. With the shifter up front and the transmission many feet away, the linkage connecting them must be an engineering curiosity all by itself. Imagine rowing through gears with a mechanism that could double as scaffolding.
Dixon was the kind of collector who understood that cars don’t have to be solemn. He spent serious money on serious Porsches and then turned around and had someone weld two of them together for a laugh. That duality is what makes the car interesting. It is not a museum piece born from historical necessity. It is a joke told with absolute craftsmanship.
Porsche purists will recoil, and they always do when someone touches their canon. But the 356 was never as precious as the culture around it suggests. Ferry Porsche built a small, clever sports car from Volkswagen parts. The idea that it cannot be played with, stretched, or reimagined misses the scrappy origins of the whole enterprise.
The auction ends October 16. Whoever wins gets a car that would be welcomed at Luftgekühlt, would stop traffic at Monterey Car Week, and would absolutely confuse anyone who thought they knew every variant Zuffenhausen ever produced. It exists because a father loved Porsches, loved his daughter, and saw no reason those two things couldn’t collide in the most extravagant way possible.
The bidding, as of now, is still climbing.
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