The Name Felt Strange: Recently Retired Porsche Design Legend Grant Larson Recalls Creating the First Boxster

Grant Larson is an American car designer who spent 36 years designing Porsches in Germany. Well, 35.5 years, as you’ll learn. He’s responsible for too many Porsches to list but is considered the father of both the Porsche Boxster as well as the Carrera GT. He retired from Porsche at the end of 2025 but plans to continue working and designing cars as his time and passion allow. We caught up with him before he began his well-earned break.

MotorTrend: Whenever I read a bio about you, it seems to always say you left Art Center and went to Audi in 1986 and then joined Porsche in ’89. What did you do with Audi for three years? I’ve never heard anyone talk about this.

Grant Larson: Because nobody ever asked! But I mean, the projects I did, well, first of all, it was a really nice studio. A really nice small studio in downtown. Downtown, if you want to call it that, sort of like a trendy area, with a lot of boutiques and stuff like that. It’s called Schwabing in Munich. And so being located there was really nice.

It was a group of 14 or 15 people, a lot of English clay modelers and British folks. Martin Smith and J Mays. J Mays is the guy that hired me out of Art Center.

MT: Oh wow. He’s pretty legendary, that guy.

GL: Yeah, I don’t know what he’s doing now, but I don’t think he’s at Whirlpool anymore. So we did what he called group projects; not only Audis but also VWs. So I, we, worked on the—this shows my age—the Golf 3 [MkIII Golf]. And then a Jetta variation of that worked on the A4, which was called a B-something-else.

MT: Oh yeah, B4 or something.

GL: Something like that. Yeah, and then a Polo. I thought the Polo was really nice and had round lamps. It kind of looked like if you chopped the roof off it would look like a Porsche 356 with blurry eyes. That was the final project I did there, and I left because I quit. They usually send you off six weeks before they have these, like, quarterly quitting dates. When I quit, I thought I’d hang around there and finish my A4 model, because Hartmut Warkuss, the chief Audi designer who was based in Ingolstadt, he liked it. But no, they kicked me out the very next day. I never really finished that car.

MT: Sounds pretty Audi/Volkswagen typical. It seems like everybody kind of went through J May’s shop at Audi.

GL: Yeah. We didn’t even have titles back then. On a side note, he asked me to, I think I was already at Porsche, I’d been at Porsche for a couple years, and J went to the West Coast, obviously, and then he opened the studio there where they did the concept Audi TT. He asked me if I was interested [in going back to Audi], but I was sketching a Boxster show car at the time, and I thought no, no, no, I’m gonna stay with this car for a while before I go back to doing VW’s or something.

MT: That’s a nice segue because I’ve always wondered where the name “Boxster” really came from. Obviously, it was a play on the “boxer” engine ...

GL: Well, it’s Boxster because of the boxer engine, and it’s a roadster.

MT: OK, so it really was that simple, then.

GL: Basically, yeah, but there is a story behind how it was named. We used to call the car “Expo.” It’s called Expo for a German word, for like a showpiece, and we just called it Expo, and all the documents and everything, I think even the fly swatter said Expo. Oh, and we had a dustpan that said Expo. People take it out of your studio, it disappears. I should have kept that dustpan that says Expo on it. But I kept the fly swatter that says 997 on it; the 997 studios fly swatter!

MT: That’s probably weirdly valuable!

GL: Yeah, I could bring it to a club meet. So anyway, we had this internal name, but the car had no name. These days, you go to agencies, you know, there’s a guy who does a lot of the words like “Twingo” and all that stuff. I’m not sure, but the marketing department had their fingers in it.

But the guy who named it was Steve Murkett. And you might know Steve, he did [design work on] the Panamericana concept [in the late ’80s]. He did the Cayenne, and he did some very early 986 and 996 stuff in their early pre-pre-development. So we had all these names, and he wrote that one down. And it was kind of, it doesn’t flow, it’s kind of sharp and punchy. It’s not like [those other Porsche names]. So my Expo car, you know, it’s like you have a child, you live with your child for a while, and then at 18 months old they suddenly decide, no, I’m going to call her something else. Yeah, “Boxster” felt strange.

MT: OK, so you know car geeks love the original Boxster concept car. And then the production car came out, and it wasn’t exactly the same, and everyone was sad for 45 minutes and then moved on with their lives. But how did you feel about the changes from the Boxster concept to the production vehicle? Were you sad, too?

GL: A little bit, but I just want to mention on the concept car, I only was responsible for the exterior. Stefan Stark did the interior, and we were like a really super-synced team. We just took the cup wheels—there’s no new wheel design, just repainted them. I only had time to do the body.

The Boxster show car helped the production car. They were struggling with packaging things. There was a big, giant can that just occupied the whole lower rear, which was the exhaust system. And we were modeling all these parts to show them that nothing fits because all the engineers, um, I don’t want to talk them down, but they hadn’t done a small roadster since forever because they were doing 928s or 944s or 993s. And we had the 989 [four-door] project’s people because we canceled the 989 in the fall of ’91, and some of those people moved over. And people from the racing department, like famous engineers, we also had them involved. So that was kind of cool.

We knew we would have to deal with compromises. And the first, first thing was the parts-sharing with the [996-generation] 911. The 911 is not going to have a door with all the bits and an indentation for a side scoop down at the bottom [like the Boxster concept had]. It has to be really neutral. That’s how it is with design. If you have an extremely neutral part, then you know, the connecting parts, you have a little bit more freedom as soon as you have a feature or a line or something, you have to run it out in the next part. So it’s a real neutral door we had to do, which made it to the Boxster and was of course really simple. And then the whole front end, you’re not designing only a 996 coupe and a 986 [Boxster] roadster; you’re designing one single car from the B-pillar forward, and the 996 had only one trunk in the front. And the Boxster had a little additional one in the back. So everything about the 996’s front trunk capacity also dictated the Boxster’s.

MT: Was it always the internal plan, for economic reasons, for the two cars to be largely identical from the B-pillar forward?

GL: Well, the initial plan was front hood and the doors and basic, basic windshield geometry, but just two different heights. The Boxster’s is shorter. But then as we progressed with the project, the 996 was also asked or requested or forced to take over the headlamps of the Boxster. That was not in the plan.

And as that progressed, the Boxster was forced to take over the front bumper of the 996. So you have, with the exception of the windscreen height, identical fronts when looking at the cars from down the road. But at the last minute, I forced through a new bumper.

MT: Ah right, the headlights were the same, but the lower face was different. And the Boxster headlights, personally, I think they’ve aged really well, and I know, it’s not nice to call them “fried eggs,” but was that also a survival thing? To put everything in one part?

GL: That was like an advanced or foreign big engineering idea of [former Porsche CEO] Dr. Wendelin Wiedeking. He came from a production background, and his initial thing at Porsche was going from the 964 to 993 [911s].

There’s a lot of shortcuts that were taken to make the whole production more efficient and all of that. You know, with all this Kaizen and stuff.

MT: I know you mean bringing in consultants from Toyota, and that’s what they called their production process.

GL: Time on the assembly line at Porsche was critical. They were [still] hand welding and brazing and filing on the 993, at the same corners they did on the 901 in the early ’60s. That’s how they built 356s. But this was the early ’90s, so we said, we’re not gonna do that anymore. The way the Boxster and 996 were developed was to speed up the process with none of that hand filing and stuff. So the faster it was, the better, and the headlamp was just something—you pull this lever, and it just drops in its place. And that made things move faster. But everywhere in the car did that, everything about it cut back hours and hours and hours on the assembly line, brought our profits up. The headlight idea was one unit with all the functions in it, right, and it was a really big challenge.

MT: With the Boxster being a roadster, was the Cayman always part of the plan, or did that come in later? I remember being on a Boxster media launch, and it was “RSK this” and “R60 that,” you know, 356 or a 550 Spyder and Roadster, Roadster, Roadster, and then, you know, a generation later, the Cayman shows up.

GL: We did some initial studies and actually called it Boxster coupe, and they’re kind of cool-looking, actually. We tried like a split rear screen on it. I don’t know if those sketches have had ever been published, but it was after the Boxster was already established, and we thought we would do these coupe studies, and I think they had potential. And then we tried some other oddball things that have never been published. I must say, it was like a Boxster Targa with a roll bar with a sunken-down part in the middle. It’s a double-bubble roof, really chopped off in the back like a 914. Critical, critical design, that’s why those never got very far.

MT: What do you mean by critical design?

GL: Visually critical internally. They never went very far. I think they might have been published someplace. I’m not really sure, maybe in some Boxster book, right? One of those actually had our development chief say, “Let’s put a 911 windshield on the Boxster,” which is an extension about this much [Larson indicates about 8 inches with his hands] along the length of the windscreen. I said, it’s gonna look terrible. He said we do it anyway. We connected that up with, like, a Targa roll bar that was chopped off at the back. It was the most unattractive Boxster derivative I’ve seen in my life. I don't think we even finished finalizing it to get it ready for a presentation.

[But] you have to do things like that with design, you have to do things like that to find out what you don’t want to do. There were some coupe studies based on the 987. Those were cool. It had a kind of like a flying buttress on a long C-pillar all the way to the back with a vertical rear screen and an indication of like an engine cover with venting. That’s the car I always wanted to do, but that also never went anywhere. We did a full side, really nice model of it. And then later on was when they came out with a proper coupe with a big giant lid, and they have a big hatch, so to speak. Then that idea was the one that basically was the Cayman taken forward based on the 987.

MT: Do you think the original Boxster has aged particularly well? Again, I’m not trying to criticize the 986 in any way, but the show car was just so cool.

GL: Yeah, the show car was intentionally a show car. And I remember doing things with the taillamps. First of all, they’re real simple, a lot of 356, just a single oval. Then we sort of put a second ... it’s real hard to explain. If you look at the section as like a double bump, yeah, and the rear bumper that fades out, rear fenders that fade out, and the outer contour of the lamp sort of is described by that. And that gave it kind of this little heart-shaped … it wasn’t intentionally supposed to be a heart. And then the oval orange part was like a 356 blinker, that was my thinking because I like the 356, so a little historical reference, and I know that we put a lot of other stuff on there. That was the trouble: You made these marks to, like, get more stuff on there, and as we did that, it turned into more of a show car instead of like a production study.

[But] we had this idea of getting a chow Car out there to indicate what our future could look like. But it was never our intention to copy it 100 percent, going back to like certain details. I think the production Boxster’s taillamps are more timeless than the show car’s taillamps. I personally think that. I really like the back of the production car better. I personally think it’s timeless for the time it was done.

Other changes we made [for the production car]: Of course, we had a proper roof on it. Then there was the side intake that was real limited. The location is like the one place you can put the side intake, and it’s there. That’s it, one place. Other compromises, we had to add volume onto the back of the car because the front had this front trunk, frunk 996 stuff going on. So we automatically had to balance the proportions and to build up volume in the back, which helped with trunk space and other things, space for space.

MT: So if I’m hearing you correctly, if Porsche had the money at the time, the Boxster could have had shorter overhangs because you’re reusing the 996 front end?

GL: Absolutely. If it’s a standalone car, we have a lot more freedom. It could have stayed that compact size, and we could have done anything with it. But with parts sharing, there would have been no way. That would have been our final nail in the coffin! Because we had given out so much money for the 989 and just started selling 993s. It was a very short production run on those things before the 996 came out. But without the parts sharing, we wouldn’t be talking about a car company right now. That was the survival [of Porsche that was on the line]. But then as the production car was developed, more compromises were made. But [later when] we also did the 997 [911], we started to separate the cars, and [did so] more and more with each generation, because we were making money.