Shades | 000
I wake to the chime of my front door at 4:17 a.m. My wife coming home from her night shift. I close my eyes and toss and turn for twenty minutes before opening them again.
Fuck it.
I get up and jump under a cold shower. Out the door by a quarter to five, heading southwest from Boston. It’s late spring and the sun is up. God’s hour. I stop at seven to charge. Coffee and a bite outside New Haven. By ten, I'm parked in Astoria and walking Steinway Street. Textbook weather. Perfect. Parents pushing strollers, lovers at cafés. Tee ball. The post-yoga march. Everything.
Press access at Wildflower Studios is at eleven, and I'm in with the cars on the dot. Greens, browns, blues, blacks, whites, more. I keep going, then do it again.
I'm chatting with an owner for twenty minutes. Then thirty. His eyes well up as he shows me the car's papers. Chronological, in plastic sleeves. Factory-ordered in the sixties. It's his child.
"I want you to sit in it."
"Not gonna say no to that."
"You put your foot on the dead pedal? Do you see what I mean about the seats?"
"It's incredible," I tell him. "Not what I expected either."
"No. Not at all."
I'm thinking about all of this. About this moment we're in. About internal combustion. About electrification. About geopolitics. About the environment. About our world. I'm thinking about my kids. The ocean. About design. Porsches. My own nostalgia. About playing in my driveway as a four-year-old, watching my father - new job, new house - pull up in a ‘90 Acura Legend coupe. New Car Day still emblazoned in my memory 36 years later. About getting picked up from summer camp a decade after in a jet black BMW E39 528i. Watching the car come up the hill. Sitting in it. The sand beige interior. The Vavona Redwood trim.
Learning to drive stick on it. Watching him trade it in for an E60. Not understanding why.
I'm thinking about the first time I drive a Porsche, a Ferrari, an R8. About trying to drift my Ford Focus around our neighborhood streets as a teenager after my parents - and the rest of the town are asleep. My memories are only fractionally visual. They are tactile and sensory. My hands gripping the wheel. The perfume of leather. Of exhaust. The turn of a key. Chimes. Startup roar. Mid-engine. Front-engine. I feel the former in my back, up my spine. The latter in my legs and stomach.
I think about driving electric. I love it. Instant torque. No jerk. Silent. On an electric motorcycle, a chain versus a belt might as well be completely different vehicles. In an electric car, every point of tactility takes on new significance.
I'm on the ground floor with Trent, circling the bike. It's my first time seeing it in real life even though I've been working with them for two years. It's beautiful. It's even better in three dimensions, and it's really fucking nice in two.
There's a Flachbau on the top floor. A particularly special one. I'm obsessed. I'm standing in the small crowd of folks admiring it. My eyes scan it slowly from front to back in high res. Then again. I’m noting tolerances, proportions, every detail. Nothing conscious. I'm so deep in it that I don't photograph it. It doesn't even occur to me. I’m a jackass. That’s why I’m here.
My third time through the main floor, my focus leaves the cars and finds the crowd. There’s something indescribable buzzing through everyone. I'm trying to break it down. To understand it in context. I feel it unequivocally. At lunch, I’m told in passing that the people-watching is almost better than the cars. “Not quite, but sure. Close.” I smile.
• • •
In the EV transition, as in so much else, there is fractious tribalism. Advocates of electrification point to the elimination of tailpipe emissions and the corresponding improvements in air quality, noise levels, and public health. They point to transportation as one of the largest contributors to global emissions and argue, reasonably, that the transition away from combustion is not optional but necessary. My brother is a climate scientist. He advocates this viewpoint. We speak about it often.
At Rare Shades, in with the Porsches, of course I’m resisting easy conclusions. There is so much beauty in this.
I’ve read reports. I’ll disappear down a rabbit hole then reemerge. The resource intensity of manufacturing a modern automobile is staggering. It blows my mind. It shouldn’t. I should know. Still. The water requirements alone are difficult to comprehend. Steel, aluminum, plastics, glass, rare earth elements, copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt. Tens of thousands of parts moving through global supply chains that span continents and oceans. The carbon cost of a vehicle accumulates before the first mile is driven.
Electric vehicles complicate the equation. The battery itself is a substantial upfront environmental investment. Mining operations reshape landscapes and societies. Processing facilities consume immense quantities of energy. Over time, depending on the electrical grid powering it and other factors, an EV might offset that initial burden through lower operational emissions. But that exchange is not one-to-one. Certainly nuanced. Indeterminate.
The break-even point varies. Geography and energy sources matter. Driving habits matter. Nothing is simple. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a stance.
• • •
I got my Polestar 2 with the performance pack. My first EV. I blew through my first set of tires in 8,000 miles, launching it over and over again, seeing what I can do in highway on-ramp corners, taking undue advantage of broken yellow center lines. Having a silent blast. Tire waste is one of the automobile industry’s major pollutants. I had two flats driving to get my kid up at summer camp. Spent the day in a Towne Fair Tire in Central Maine. I had no idea what was going on. A few Google queries humbled me. Heavy, torquey vehicles that eat through rubber.
Mike shares his opinions on AI with me. On data centers. On cloud computing. “Do you have any idea what the energy expenditure there is?” He’s adamant that the most sustainable thing we can do from a responsible car owner perspective is buy a used hybrid, drive it daily, and save our passion projects for the weekend coffee run. He shuts me down from multiple angles when I tell him I want a Taycan. It’s a bloodbath. I still want one.
We chat about the constant promise that technological progress will solve the problems created by previous technological progress. Energy demands are extraordinary. Water demands are extraordinary. Yet the preached potential is transformative.
We are simultaneously trying to decarbonize transportation, maintain mobility, preserve economic growth, satisfy consumer expectations, and continue manufacturing hundreds of millions of complex products. Every proposed solution introduces its own tradeoffs. Most of us are also trying to find a degree of joy in our vehicles - and our lives by extension, though we may search for it in different ways and with different degrees of intensity.
• • •
I walk another lap through the show. I’ve lost count now. My feet hurt. I’m sweaty. My back and shoulders chafed from camera straps.
What lingers now is not the beauty of the cars but the beauty in the care given to them. Whatever motivates it — nostalgia, joy, curiosity, community, pride, obsession — there is something good in the act of caring for a thing. Of maintaining it. Of repairing it. Of preserving it. Of extending its presence in the world rather than discarding it for the marginal gains the next best thing brings.
000 is an independent publication dedicated to Porsche culture, design, and history. Rare Shades is its flagship gathering, bringing together owners, collectors, designers, and enthusiasts from around the world to celebrate rare and significant Porsche automobiles, with color serving as the event's organizing theme and point of departure.
Written by Chessin Gertler | Photography by Chessin Gertler