Gurdeep Panesar is the talented artist behind swedge., a design studio with a decade and a half of experience using creative tools — five years of which were spent serving as a Product Engineer with Jaguar Land Rover. And while swedge. trades in all manner of designs, he has a clear proclivity for delivering thoroughly modernized takes on classic cars — one of which sees Panesar bestow this treatment onto the thoroughly iconic Porsche 911 Targa.
A rendered imagining of a future generation of the 911, this concept does away with the traditional Targa configuration — a removable roof and a separate fold-down rear cover — and replaces it with a fighter jet-style canopy that acts as the car’s windshield, sliding forward to open in order to allow a driver and/or passenger to exit or enter the vehicle. The back-end of the item draws inspiration from double-bubble designs, with an acrylic rear decklid with half-a-dozen velocity stacks poking out through a transparent cover and sending air to the Porsche’s — most likely hybridized — straight-six.
The Porsche 930 also played a key role in inspiring some of the design’s more vintage-looking elements, and as such, the concept artist has opted to treat it to horizontal LED strip taillights, flared fenders, a truncated ducktail spoiler, and circular LED headlights with Porsche logos worked into the bulbs — all contemporary takes on throwback features. The project’s interior has also received an ultra-sleek twist on the 911’s sport seats, and an aviation-inspired, yoke-style steering wheel. Completing the theme is a set of blacked-out Fuchs-inspired wheels that wonderfully contrast the Porsche’s “Speed Yellow” livery.
Back in 2020, swedge. unveiled an earlier iteration of this same design, however, the latest renders boast far more detail and a markedly higher level of realism. With an unmistakably sleek and futuristic design that keeps one foot firmly planted in the past, we can only hope that future generations of the 911 look even half as good as the artist’s take on the car.
