There Was Once An Indonesian Knockoff Porsche 911 With A Tiny Mazda Engine Up Front

I have to admit, there’s an immature part of me – a part that I’d say is really just a small part of my overall character, no more than, say, 82% of my being – that loves the idea of taking the piss out of people really, really into specific high-end car brands. This can be people really into, say, Ferraris or BMWs or Mercedes-Benzes or even Teslas; basically people so focused on the status and perceived superiority of one make of car that it effectively dominates their personalities.

There’s certainly a subset of Porsche enthusiasts who can be like this, too. And if you had a specific goal of getting hardcore Porsche fanatics really indignant and worked up about a particular car, I have a feeling that there’s one particular car, made in Indonesia in the early 1990s, that would absolutely do the trick: the Marvia 911.

That’s because while this car looks almost identical to an early ’90s Porsche 911, under the skin it’s something terribly different: an Indonesian-built fourth-generation Mazda 323, with its 70 horsepower, 1.4-liter liquid-cooled engine. This car was built by a company called Indomobil and was sold as a sort of locally-built people’s car.

That car up there. That’s what this thing that looks like a 911 really is, underneath:

I mean, that sure as hell looks like a real Porsche 911, right? How is it possible this thing exists?

The story behind the Marvia 911 is a strange one, and one that really could only have happened at one specific place and time: early 1990s Indonesia. The country at that time was experiencing something of an economic boom, with all sorts of multinational companies expanding into the Indonesian market, and there was a growing demand for more high-end and luxury goods for newly prosperous segments of the population.

There were still huge tax penalties for imported cars, so carmakers like Porsche, who wanted to break into the Indonesian market, were looking for partners to assemble cars locally to avoid the punitive taxation. That’s where Indomobil comes in.

Porsche and Indomobil were in talks about possible assembly of Porsche 911s locally, or at least one telling of the story goes. Other accounts suggest that it was Indomobil who reached out first, though not to Porsche at first, but to Audi, who declined to have Indomobil build their cars locally.

However it started, Indomobil seems to have received some 911s to study in preparation for possible local assembly, but that agreement never came to fruition. What absolutely did happen, though, was that Indomobil’s kit car-building subsidiary, Marvia Graha Motor, began to produce the shockingly accurate-looking 911 clone called the Marvia 911.

The Marvia 911’s body was fiberglass, and the molds for the fiberglass body panels were taken directly from the actual steel panels of a real 911. The Mazda MR90 platform and suspension was modified significantly (a whole new chassis of steel tubing was actually used, with the MR90 suspension and drivetrain bolted to it) to have the same ride height as a real 911, but these ersatz 911s retained the Mazda’s front engine/rear-wheel drive layout (that was the last era of 323 to do it that way before FWD), making them the first liquid-cooled “911”s.

The engine had to be lowered four inches from its original position in the Mazda, but once that was done, everything fit under the sloping hood of the 911 without issue.

The seats were much more 911-like in the Marvia, but the dashboard and instruments were, for the most part, right out of the Mazda. Other components like headlamps, taillights, glass, door handles, window rubber and other components seemed to be sourced directly from Porsche, being bought in quantity by Indomobil under the guise of service parts.

Look at how convincing this thing is on this video; this particular one has had some engine upgrades, because I guess 70 bold, determined horses isn’t enough for some people:

Of course, even if the Marvia 911s looked the part, they didn’t drive or handle anything like a real Porsche 911. But, really, for many people who were just using these as daily drivers, that hardly mattered. They looked like Porsches, people treated you like a Porsche driver, and as long as nobody walked up and wondered why the engine noises were coming from the wrong end, the charade was pretty convincing.

As you can likely guess, any chance of Porsche agreeing to let Indomobil assemble 911s fell apart when Porsche got wind of the fact that Indomobil was already building Porsche 911 knockoffs and selling them, proudly, in their showrooms. The Marvia 911s sold for 35 million Indonesian rupiah, and, for comparison, the Mazda MR90 sold for 27 million rupiah, and the real Porsche 911s would have sold for around 400 million rupiah. In this context, the Marvia 911 was an incredible bargain, a tenth the price of a real 911 and just a bit more than a dumpy little hatchback. With those numbers, who cared if the Marvia knockoff only made 70 hp!

Porsche may have been considering legal action against Marvia, but riots in 1998 related to the ousting of military dictator Suharto led to the destruction of the Marvia factory, and the subsidiary never recovered after that. So there was nothing left for Porsche to bother suing, anyway.

In total, only about 50 Marvia 911s were actually built, and remain perhaps the best Porsche knock-offs ever built. I can just imagine the fun one could have bringing a well-sorted Marvia 911 to a Porsche show, and enjoying the gasps of shock and disgust as you opened that hood, revealing not a well-carpeted luggage area, but a sad little 1.4-liter econobox engine from a Mazda that was first introduced in 1977.

That seems like a pretty good time.

Top graphic image: @andreastaulany/Instagram