The German word means special wish. The cars it produced are unrepeatable.
What Sonderwunsch means
Sonderwunsch translates roughly as special wish, and it is the name Porsche has used for its bespoke program, the channel through which a customer's specific, unusual, personal request becomes a car the factory actually builds. Not a color from the chart or an option from the list, but something genuinely custom, asked for by one buyer and executed by the factory for that buyer alone.
The program has existed in various forms across the company's history, formalized and named at some points, more informal at others. The principle has remained constant. If a customer wants something specific enough and is willing to pay for the factory's effort, Porsche has long been willing to build it. A particular interior, a unique combination of features, a detail from another model grafted onto this one, a personalization that exists on no other car.
Why these cars are different
A standard production car, however rare, was built to a specification that other cars shared. A Sonderwunsch car was built to a specification that, by definition, no other car shared, because it originated as one person's specific wish. That makes these cars genuinely unrepeatable in a way that even rare production cars are not. The documentation traces the special request back to the original order, and the car stands as a physical record of one customer's exact desire, executed by the factory.
For collectors, that is close to the ideal object. Provable, factory-built, and unique not by accident of survival but by original intent. The value of such cars reflects it.
The modern revival
In recent years Porsche has formally revived and expanded the Sonderwunsch idea, building out the bespoke program as a named, structured offering for customers who want a factory-personalized car. The company recognized that the appetite for genuine customisation, for a car built to a personal wish rather than pulled from a configurator, was real and worth serving directly.
It connects to something old in the company. Porsche began, before it built its own cars, as an engineering consultancy that solved specific problems for specific clients. The idea of building exactly what one customer wants, rather than what the market broadly demands, is woven into the company's origin. Sonderwunsch is that origin expressed in the language of personalization, the factory agreeing to make your specific wish real.