Here’s What You Get When You Have Porsche Give Your Old Cayenne A Full Factory Restoration

Nobody tells you how unbelievably expensive car restoration is. After all, a factory-finish respray alone can cross the five-figure threshold, and that’s before you get into the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of labor to take everything apart and put it back together with shiny new parts. It’s not the sort of process normally lavished on a vehicle you might see on a buy-here-pay-here lot, and yet, here we are. Someone had Porsche restore their 2009 Cayenne, and there’s something joyous about that.

Mind you, this isn’t just any heavily depreciated 16-year-old SUV: it’s an incredibly rare manual Cayenne GTS. The pairing of a 399-horsepower 4.8-liter V8 and a row-your-own six-speed manual gearbox in an SUV is unique, and it probably helped that this example only had around 50,000 miles on the clock when it was sent to Porsche for the full Sonderwunsch treatment. That being said, it’s still a 16-year-old car, and components like bushings and rubber fixtures can age just as much from time as they can from mileage.

As such, once the Cayenne arrived in Zuffenhausen, Porsche’s restoration experts went to town using the same sort of Factory Recommission process normally reserved for stuff like Carrera GT hypercars. Think restoration, but with a few tweaks. In addition to any necessary mechanical work, they fitted knobbly tires and a tow bar to pull an Airstream. Then they sprayed it in Black Olive paint, a subtle shade of dark green you’d normally need a paint-to-sample allocation to spec.

On the inside, this Cayenne has been completely retrimmed with English Green leather upholstery and seat inserts made of trippy Pasha cloth straight out of the 911 Spirit 70. The glovebox lining? Also Pasha.

The result is that this Cayenne genuinely looks brand new inside and out, aided by the fact that the Apple CarPlay and Android Auto-capable Porsche Classic Communication Management plus infotainment system isn’t compatible with facelifted E1 Cayennes. Right down to the Recession-era graphics on the navigation system, it’s like someone put in a mega-spec order in 2009 and it just arrived.

It’s worth noting that not only has Porsche continued to crank out parts for the first-generation Cayenne including skid plates and a Transsyberia-style spoiler, it’s also rolled out new ones including some graphics packages. It’s exceptionally rare for automakers to care this much about an aging SUV, but maybe this is a sign of things to come. The world at large might not be ready for collectable 2000s family rigs yet, but if enthusiasm exists, why not celebrate it?

As such, I love that the owner of this Cayenne adores it enough to have it shipped across the Atlantic for the full factory restoration program. I love that it would’ve been worth maybe $70,000 tops, but has likely seen multiples of that spent on it. While Porsche hasn’t divulged a figure for this build, the factory restoration process on other models can run hundreds of thousands of dollars. This 16-year-old SUV is the definition of doing it for the love of the game, and in an era where enthusiast cars are often viewed as speculative assets, dumping a load of money into one because it speaks to you is cool.

Top graphic image: Porsche