Seeing a seven-figure Porsche come up for grabs in an online auction is almost a daily affair these days. But the majority of these cars are high-performance machines built in very limited numbers.
While this Porsche Type 597 ticks the limited availability box, by no means would you ever be allowed to call it high-performance, as it is an off-road machine designed for military use.
To understand why the Type 597 became a thing, we need to look back to 1953, when Porsche was competing against Auto Union and Borgward Group for a military contract.
Porsche ended up building 71 of these strange-looking machines to prove its point. Unfortunately, Porsche missed out on the contract, but left the world with an off-roader long before the Cayenne would even be considered.
Though it might not look like the cars Porsche was making during that era, it actually shares a lot with the 356. It's 1.5-litre air-cooled engine and four-speed transmission is the same as what you'd find in the iconic sports car.
For battlefield deployment, it got features like a selectable four-wheel drive system, and a heap of ground clearance. It's also said that a few prototypes were fitted with a propeller at the rear to make the Type 597 completely amphibious.
This last piece of information isn't too surprising, considering that Volkswagen had already built the Kübelwagen for WWII, which also had amphibious tendencies.
If you're wanting to get your hands on this strange piece of Porsche history, RM Sotheby's is auctioning it off online. Pre-auction estimates state that it's probably going to sell for between $1 million and $1.2 million.
