Buy This Vintage Porsche ‘Sport Toboggan’ Sled From the 1960s
Judging from the Porsche brochure, it seems like you can go wakeboarding with this sled as well.
It's not uncommon for automakers to participate in building other means of transportation. Honda's made bicycles and McLaren's dabbled in push cars for children. Then there was that one time in the 1960s when Porsche made a "Sport Toboggan" sled. It's about three feet long—so meant for kids, really—but it's undoubtedly a fun bit of Porsche history and manufacturing. And there's one for sale.
Listed by Bonhams, the sled is painted dark blue and features plastic handles and a racy plaid cushion. It's made of fiberglass and sports the company's iconic crest on the front. This, I have determined, significantly lowers the sled's coefficient of drag. Along with the sled, Bonhams is also offering a framed copy of what looks like the sled's sales brochure that includes a bit about how to use it in the winter and the summer. I see a photo of someone presumably using it to wakeboard in addition to sledding with it, which justifies me writing about this thing during the height of the hot season.
Admittedly, the images Bonhams has provided are a bit low-res, so I can't really read the brochure very well. If one of you does buy the sled, please let me know what it says because I'd love to know. The live auction will end in three days on Aug. 12, so you have some time to decide if this piece of Porsche history is for you. As of this writing, the current bid stands at $1,800 and there's no reserve.
Seeing as the Sport Toboggan is from the 1960s, it's led Silodrome to speculate as to whether these sleds were built in the same fiberglass part of the manufacturing plant as the Porsche 904s because the automaker started to really use fiberglass construction in its vehicles in 1964. The timelines do seem to match up.
It's unclear if the sled listed by Bonhams is the same one that was listed for sale on Mecum Auctions during the Monterey auctions in 2013. The Mecum listing noted its sled was from the Peter and Cheryl Dunkel collection and does not mention how much it was actually sold for; the Bonhams auction lists the seller only as "JohnT2022," located in Los Angeles, California.
This 1960s fiberglass example isn't the last time the German automaker built a sled, by the way. If you'll remember, Porsche Design built a composite bobsled in 2010 for $225. That bobsled looks very serious and not very fun at all though; if you're going for charm, the Sport Toboggan gets my vote.
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