We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Learn more ›
Russian body shop guru Arthur Tussik has a knack for bringing totaled cars back to perfectly-aligned condition, and his latest project is this 991-generation Porsche 911 Turbo S that’s been crunched at all four corners. This one is even more incredible than his previous restorations, though, as it takes an entire other car’s rear end to resurrect the original crunched 911.
That’s right: the whole back end of the 911 gets swapped with the rear end of a completely different car. The original 911’s damage extended all the way up into the rear of the passenger compartment, so instead of fixing that, Tussik simply starts fresh with an undamaged rear end. Tussik spends hours loosening rivets and metal at existing seams and cutting the crunched half off of the car to mate it up just perfectly with the donor butt.
Nearly everything ahead of the car’s firewall gets replaced as well, including the frame rails. This part was also off of a donor car. Tussik’s extreme attention to detail means that he even breaks out a laser level to make sure everything aligns correctly.
The finished 911 Turbo S body is a patchwork of different colors and primer, but everything fits together as it should. According to Tussik, the whole car took about 100 hours to finish. He won’t win any concours with it, but to those of us who don’t wander around with paint thickness meters in our bags, it’ll look the part of an intact 911 once the rest of the parts go in.
But would you want to drive it after all of this work? This question always comes up every time Tussik resurrects a thoroughly borked car: This is mesmerizing to watch, but the forces involved in a major collision no doubt put extra fatigue on the 911’s metal structure, and that unibody isn’t as uni-piece as it used to be.
While Tussik disassembles much of the rear end at the car’s existing seams and adds additional metal to shore up the places where he’s cut, all I can think of is the term “cut and shut.” Cut-and-shut cars are an infamous used car scam where two different cars that were destroyed at opposite ends get welded together to make one running car—with far less attention to detail than Tussik does here.
Even with all of Tussik’s perfectionism, this 911 is much less rigid than it used to be. The fact that one of the main structural cuts was through the door sill is a big red flag to me, as a person who’s writing this while facing the door off her t-boned 944.
So, would you drive a car like this knowing that this is how its body was repaired? Would you want to add a roll cage in it to shore up the structure? Or would you nope right out of this neatly reassembled 911 Turbo S after you learned what it’d been through?
[H/T Road & Track!]
Got a tip? Send us a note: tips@thedrive.com
