Porsche 911 (993)
Why 4.3: The final air-cooled 911 and, for a lot of the community, the best-driving one — hydraulic steering, a fixed rear-suspension geometry, a manual gearbox nobody had to ask for. Being 'the last one' turned out to be worth more than being merely great.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
The last air-cooled flat-six brings the cooling-fan whir and the hard mechanical clatter that water jackets later silenced, and it carries a long way. But 6,700 rpm and a restrained factory exhaust keep it well short of the GT cars. The best of the ordinary 911s.
6-cylinder · naturally aspirated · 6,700 rpm redline · rated 7.8 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €41k (2000) → €133k (2026), trending up · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
Belt-only in the back — lap belts on Euro-spec Cabriolets, three-point on US cars. ISOFIX as a standard didn't exist yet for a car this age.
993 predates ISOFIX proper: from MY1996, Porsche's own child seat clips its belt tongue into a bar fitted under the passenger seat, which mechanically cuts the airbag — no bracket, no key switch, just the clip. Earlier '95 cars may not have had it.
This clip-bar system is a 993-era curiosity; later 911s replaced it with the familiar dash/glovebox key switch.
Pelican Parts 993 child-seat technical article; PistonHeads 993 owner reports (owner-community sourced, not manufacturer documentation)
The long version
For most of its production run this was simply the newest 911, bought and driven by people who wanted an air-cooled Porsche and could still afford a fairly ordinary used-car budget for one. That changed once the air-cooled era visibly ended with the 996's water-cooled switch in 1998 — the 993 became, retroactively, the last one, and values have more than tripled since the mid-2000s on that scarcity alone. A meaningful share still gets driven hard by owners who bought in before the boom; the newer money arriving at today's prices tends to treat matching-numbers paperwork as seriously as the drive.