Singer built a Porsche around a wristwatch, and Louis Vuitton picked up the tab
The starting point for the strangest project in Monterey this year wasn’t a chassis, an engine, or a design sketch. It was a clock.
According to Singer’s announcement, a client asked Louis Vuitton to build a dashboard timepiece for a 911 already in the queue at Torrance. La Fabrique du Temps, the House’s watch workshop in Switzerland, made one. Then somebody looked at the finished cockpit, decided the clock made everything around it look cheap, and the scope started metastasizing. A year later, the two companies have jointly shown a pair of Type 964-based cars — a Classic coupe and a Classic Turbo cabriolet — that Louis Vuitton describes as the first co-branded product in its 172-year history. Singer says the same about itself.
Two very different 911s under the fashion
The coupe rides on a 964 coupe shell wearing carbon fiber bodywork in saffron, with a 4.0-liter naturally aspirated air-cooled flat-six, a six-speed manual, rear-wheel drive, carbon-ceramic brakes, and a speed-activated rear wing. That last item is worth pausing on: the donor 964 came from the factory with an electrically deployed spoiler that rises at speed and drops back at low speed, and Singer kept that logic rather than bolting on a fixed wing. It’s the rare restomod decision that adds complexity instead of deleting it.
The cabriolet is the more interesting machine mechanically. It uses Singer’s Classic Turbo services, built around a 3.8-liter twin-turbocharged evolution of the Mezger flat-six with electric wastegates and air-to-water intercoolers mounted inside the intake plenums. Singer’s published output for that service starts at 450 horsepower with 510 available; neither company quoted a figure for this particular car, which is the sort of omission that tells you who the intended audience is.
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Air-to-water intercooling on an air-cooled engine sounds like a punchline, but it’s the only sensible answer to the packaging problem. There is no room behind a 911’s rear axle for the ducting an air-to-air system needs, and the 930’s original intercooler is the reason that car wears a tea-tray spoiler in the first place. Putting the charge coolers inside the plenums shortens the intake path to almost nothing, which sharpens throttle response, and it makes charge temperature depend on a coolant loop you can control rather than on whatever air happens to be passing through the engine bay. The tradeoff is heat soak in traffic and a water circuit to maintain on a car whose whole identity is not having one.
The parts that will age interestingly
The cabriolet’s bumpers are wood. So is the rear luggage deck, varnished using runabout construction methods, plus panelling in the engine bay and front trunk. It looks spectacular in photos. It also means that a parking-lot tap that would cost a body shop an afternoon now requires a cabinetmaker, and that the owner has signed up for the maintenance schedule of a Riva — varnish is a consumable, UV is relentless, and wood moves with humidity in ways carbon fiber does not. Anyone commissioning something similar should budget for storage that’s climate-controlled rather than merely dry.
The coupe’s cobalt blue tires are described as demonstration tires, and that language is doing real work. Tire sidewalls are black because carbon black is a structural reinforcing filler, not a dye. Take it out to get a saturated color and you give up abrasion resistance and heat tolerance, which is why colored tires historically live on show stands and not on interstates. Assume the car ships with a set of conventional black rubber for the days it actually gets driven.
Inside, the switchgear, vents, locks and pull-tabs have been replaced with hand-finished metal components, largely rhodium-plated. Rhodium is a genuinely eccentric choice — it’s a platinum-group metal that trades at multiples of gold, and it’s used in catalytic converters and white gold plating because it’s hard and doesn’t tarnish. As a durability decision for high-touch controls it’s defensible. As a line item it’s absurd, which is presumably the point.
Singer says redesigning the speedometer, tachometer and gauges to match the Tambour watch design language consumed a full year. That’s less ridiculous than it reads. Automotive gauges have to track sender signals accurately across temperature swings, and needle mass and balance directly affect how a movement responds and settles. You can’t simply draw a prettier hand and hand it to the supplier. The clock itself detaches and converts to a desk clock, which neatly solves the other problem: a mechanical movement bolted to a car dashboard lives through vibration, heat cycling and long dormancy that no wristwatch endures, and one you can pull out and keep indoors is one you’ll actually service.
The business underneath the leather
Two structural facts about Singer’s model matter here and get lost in the fashion coverage. First, the customer supplies the donor 964, and the car keeps its original VIN and title. These are legally 1990s Porsches that have been extensively modified — not new vehicles — which is exactly why they don’t need to satisfy current federal crash and emissions certification. Second, Singer is careful, in every release including this one, to state that it is not affiliated with Porsche AG. That disclaimer isn’t legal boilerplate for its own sake; it’s what keeps the company on the right side of trademark law while still being allowed to say the word “Porsche” in its own marketing.
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For owners of anything in this orbit, the insurance angle is the practical one. A car like this needs an agreed-value policy written off a professional appraisal, because there is no comparable sale to point at after a total loss. The capsule that comes with it — luggage, a surfboard with oak and walnut marquetry, skis, a Tambour Automatic — almost certainly isn’t covered by an auto policy at all, and belongs on a scheduled personal property rider. Plenty of six-figure collector cars are underinsured on their contents.
As for what this says about Singer, the company has spent 2026 doing everything except staying boutique. It opened Goodwood as the Festival of Speed’s Central Feature marque in July, announced a chassis engineering partnership with Red Bull Advanced Technologies in February, and passed 300 Classic restorations in California back in 2024 with more than 600 employees on the books. The Classic coupe here was built in California; the turbo cabriolet was built in England.
The open question is resale. Heavily branded collaborations tend to split collectors — some pay a premium for the story, others discount for the tattoo they can’t remove. On a car this specific, with a livery this loud, the buyer pool narrows considerably. That’s a problem for exactly one or two people on earth, and they’re not reading this.
Images Via: Singer
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