Exactly thirty-two years ago, Gemballa, the German tuning firm known for its outlandish RUF-powered Porsches, revealed its then new reimagined 911 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held at the Las Vegas Convention Centre in Nevada. You might think the annual Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) event held at the same venue would make more sense for the unveiling of a new sports car, but CES — a trade show presenting new-to-market technologies in the consumer electronics industry — was a good fit for Gemballa due to the company’s habit of loading its products with state-of-the-art in-car entertainment equipment and novel driver aid technologies, such as cameras in place of door mirrors and a dashboard-mounted high-resolution colour screen to display the feed.
Based on a 964 Turbo and announced as successor to the utterly bonkers 930-derived line of 911s Gemballa produced in the mid-1980s (most famously, the Cirrus, Avalanche and Mirage), the CES display car featured radically reworked body panels, including a cut-down plastic roof and a Flachbau (slant-nosed) front end with 924 GTP-style exposed headlamps. An upright windscreen, a colossal integrated rear wing, reprofiled bumpers and exaggerated rear quarters adding significant width to the 964 shape also featured, the latter accommodating