Three one-off Porsche 911s are hiding under covers somewhere in Zuffenhausen right now, each one hand-built to channel a cartoon cowboy, a space ranger, and a cowgirl. Porsche and Pixar are back at it, and the cars won’t see daylight until the Toy Story 5 premiere hits Los Angeles on June 19.
This is the second time Porsche has raided the Pixar vault for inspiration. The first collaboration, back in 2022, produced a single custom 911 modeled after Sally Carrera from Cars, finished in a bespoke Sally Blue Metallic with her pinstripe tattoo on the rear bumper. That car eventually sold at auction for $3.6 million. The playbook worked, so now the ambition has tripled.
The new trio, themed around Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and Jessie, was created through Porsche’s Sonderwunsch program. That’s the factory’s in-house bespoke division where standard 911s go in and deeply personalized machines come out. Each car is finished by hand after rolling off the regular Zuffenhausen production line.
Porsche has released exactly one teaser image, and it’s worth studying. Two of the silhouettes look like conventional 911 shapes viewed from the rear. The third doesn’t.
It has a pronounced front end and a serious rear wing, the kind of profile that screams GT3 or something even more aggressive. If Porsche matched Buzz Lightyear to a 911 GT3 Manthey, that would be the kind of lunatic energy this project demands.
Bob Pauley, Pixar’s production designer on Toy Story 5, described the challenge as “interpreting these characters through materials, color, and form, staying true to who they are without being literal.” That’s the interesting needle to thread. A yellow-and-brown 911 with a sheriff’s star on the door would be costume design, not car design.
Porsche’s Sonderwunsch team has historically been more subtle than that, working in material textures, interior treatments, and paint formulations that suggest rather than scream.
The film itself follows the original gang as they confront a tablet device named Lilypad who threatens to make physical toys obsolete. Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, and Joan Cusack all return. The cultural timing, analog nostalgia versus digital dominance, maps neatly onto Porsche’s own identity crisis as it straddles combustion engines and electrification.
All three 911s will be auctioned together as a set after the premiere, with proceeds going to charities focused on children and communities in need. The Sally car proved there’s serious collector appetite for this kind of thing. Bundling three vehicles could push the final number into genuinely staggering territory.
Timo Resch, CEO of Porsche Cars North America, leaned into the sentimentality: “Many people fondly look back on their first toy, much like the feeling they experience when they see or drive one of our cars for the first time.” It’s a polished line, but it’s not wrong. Porsche has always understood that its cars occupy emotional real estate far beyond transportation.
The real test comes June 19 when the covers drop. A one-off Sally was a love letter. Three Toy Story 911s sold as a charity set is a full-blown franchise play, one that bets Porsche’s hand-crafted credibility can coexist with Disney’s merchandising machine.
The Sally project proved the concept. Now Porsche has to prove it scales without losing the magic that made the first one matter.
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