Anyone speeding through The Netherlands from the early 1960s until the mid-’90s would have faced a startling sight in their mirrors.
Coming up fast with lights ablaze and siren blaring would have been one of the 507 Porsches ordered by the Dutch traffic police to patrol its highways.
It’s a relationship that began in 1962, when the country’s motorways were unrestricted and serious accidents were commonplace. Dutch cops demanded high-performance rapid response vehicles and headed across the border into Germany for the solution.
Picking Porsche over the likes of BMW or Mercedes came down to a truly unique requirement: These pursuit vehicles needed to be open-topped to allow an officer to stand up and direct traffic without leaving the vehicle. Porsche’s 356 Cabriolet was just the ticket.
The first cars were delivered in pure white, with little to identify their official purpose beyond the word “Rijkspolitie” writ large on the front, a light pole attached to the windscreen, and a siren rigged to the rear deck.
Traffic police were expected to drive roof-down in all weathers so were dressed like their two-wheeled counterparts in leather riding gear. So taken were the Dutch rozzers with the 356 that when production ended in 1966, they made sure to buy up the last 10 cars off the line.
That’s because, although the 911 was already on sale by this time, a closed coupe failed to meet their quirky cop spec. With the launch of the Targa in 1967, however, the fast feds had their replacement.
The earliest examples retained the near-standard look of the 356, albeit with the light pole moved to the chunky Targa B-pillar, but soon a patriotic orange livery would be added to make the cop cars more of a deterrent.
Porsche 911 Targas would continue to make up the majority of the high-speed fleet, progressing through the G-Series, 964, and 993 generations (with a few 914s and 924s along the way) until 1996, when a combination of restricted speed limits and restricted budgets meant that the cost of maintaining them could no longer be justified, and the world’s biggest Porsche police force was disbanded. Today, you’ll be pulled over by a BMW or Audi instead.
On the plus side, many of the ex-forces Porsches still survive in private collections around the world. If you fancy some cop cosplay yourself, we found a 1992 example for sale for €139,911.
