Rock queen Joplin’s Porsche fetches record price

December 13, 2015 by Alastair Sloane

The psychedelic Porsche 356C 1600 convertible owned by rock legend Janis Joplin has sold at auction in New York for NZ$2.68 million – around NZ$2m more than the estimate.

Auctioneers RM Sothebys said it was the most paid for a Porsche 356 at public auction.

Joplin sitting pretty

Joplin bought the 1964 model secondhand in 1968. It was painted silver/gray before she got a roadie with her band Big Brother and the Holding Company to turn it into one of the first ‘art cars’.

He painted the entire exterior with a variety of motifs, including a landscape across the passenger side, butterfly on the driver’s door, a rainbow connecting two faces at the back, and an eye on the front.

Joplin called the mural ‘history of the universe’ and drove the car regularly in California before she died from a drug overdose in October 1970.

She recorded the song ‘Oh Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz’ only two days before her death. The lyrics continued … ‘My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends …’

Joplin’s brother Michael and sister Laura later owned the car but repainted it gray again. The story goes that they quickly realised their mistake and got artists to recreate the mural from the many photos of the car.

In 1995, they loaned it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, where it has been until this week.

If you are in a position to shell out upwards of NZ$600,000 for the 60^thanniversary Porsche 911 S/T or optional Porsche 911 S/T Heritage, you’ll no doubt want the signature titanium watch that goes with it. That’s how Porsche figures it anyway. Or, if you want the watch you’ll need to get the car. Both the car and the watch are limited to 1963 units, the year the original 911 model broke cover. The watch – Chronograph 1 911 S/T and Chronograph 1 911 S/T Heritage – and the car carry matching edition numbers. The watch is priced at $US13,500, or around $NZ22,200. The car, says Porsche NZ, starts at $NZ608,000. A “strictly limited number” will go into production for NZ early next year.

Eight European Union countries are pushing to weaken new EU emissions limits for cars, saying they are overly ambitious and unrealistic for carmakers to hit. The eight countries – France, Italy, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia – said in a joint paper that parts of the proposed Euro 7 regulation, including curbs on exhaust pipe emissions, should be scrapped entirely. They said the limits would force carmakers to invest in improving exhaust emissions performance, money which would be better spent on developing zero-emission vehicles. Taken together, the countries would have enough votes to block the proposal.

A go-anywhere EV concept for the US military uses an onboard 12kW diesel generator to top up the batteries on the move. The all-wheel-drive has 800-volt technology and a 200kWh battery pack to power three electric motors, two in the rear and one up front. Claimed output is 745kW/15,590Nm, or 1000hp and 11,500 ft-lb of torque. The four-seater was developed by the defence division of General Motors and is based on the platform of the Hummer SUV. It rides on Fox performance shock absorbers and 37-inch tyres and comes with “exceptional” approach and departure angles for off-road mobility. Maximum range using the generator to keep things ticking over is said to be around 500km.

The outside temperature in Midland, Texas, was 40.5C when staff at the local office of the US National Weather Service set out to show the cabin of a closed car can literally get baking hot in summer. They mixed up a batch of chocolate chip cookies and laid them on the car’s dashboard – the surface of which showed a temperature of 87.7C. A little over four hours later the cookies were ready to eat. “Even though ours weren’t golden brown, we can confirm that they are done and delicious,” the staff wrote on Facebook.