It is covered in crud, has gouges in the bodywork and in some places the paintwork is badly chipped.
Porsche usually like to present its luxury cars in glistening showroom condition, but this particular 911 wears its layer of dirt with pride and it will not be going through a car wash soon.
After all, the grime doesn't come from just any old place, but from the summit of the western ridge of the Ojos Del Salado.
As the highest active volcano in the world, the peak lies on the edge of the Chilean Atacama Desert and has the same appeal for extreme car drivers as Mount Everest does for mountaineers.
Time and again, expeditions battle their way across its glaciers and scree fields to heights where all paths, let alone roads just run out. Even breathing normally is hard up here.
Now a Porsche 911, of all machines, has now made it to the summit. The 911 Altitude, which looks like a VW Beetle on steroids, scuttled up the western ridge of the volcano to 6,734 metres above sea level. It's altitude record for motor vehicles and not just Porsches.
Porsche did not say why it thought it necessary to modify its iconic sports car to scale such heights but maybe they were inspired by the simple remark "because it's there" by English mountaineer George Mallory who died on his third attempt to climb Everest in 1924.
But lead car "Edith", to use the rather prim name given to the car by its developers, is no ordinary 911. Porsche chose it and a copycat sibling called "Doris" as back-up to celebrate the 30th anniversary of all-wheel drive in the 911.
Both are based on a current 911 4S with all-wheel drive. But the three-litre boxer engine with 450 hp remained unchanged, as did the seven-speed manual gearbox.
However, the engineers converted pretty much everything else about this car to make it suitable for expeditions. The vice-like bucket seat with harness and roll cage sit in an otherwise completely stripped-out but technology-packed cabin. Added to that is the lightweight body from the GT racing cars.
Naturally, Edith and Doris are not for sale and there are no plans to market the car which is totally unpractical for normal road use.
The most important and noticeable changes are to the chassis. Where the sports car would normally crouch as low as possible above the ground, Edith stands as if on stilts and claws its way into the dirt with the coarse studs of its 34-inch balloon tyres.
This is made possible by what are known as portal axles, which are usually found in off-road vehicles such as the Unimog. An intermediate gearbox on the wheel hub raises the body by more than 20 centimetres, so that Edith now has 35 centimetres more ground clearance than any Porsche Cayenne.
At the same time, the gearing ensures maximum low-end urge. This means the 911 accelerates much more slowly and revs correspondingly higher, so that you have to change gear much earlier. It also barely reaches a maximum speed of 80 km/h, making it officially the slowest works car since the end of Porsche tractor production.
But the car grabs at the ground even harder for it and has tree stump-pulling torque and strong acceleration to boot. So it's no wonder that the 911 dirt sends the dirt splattering across the landscape when it takes off. And if Edith does should get stuck, she has a winch to extract herself from any mess.
It's hard to imagine what French racing driver Romain Dumas though at the wheel during those 10 hours when he drove the last 40 kilometres from the base camp at around 5,800 metres to the summit on December 2, 2023.
"I'll never forget this experience. It was an extraordinary feeling to drive where no car has gone before," said Dumas shortly after his descent from the volcano. "The 911 managed to go higher than any other earthbound vehicle in history."
The lead car received a very special additional piece of technology – a drive-by-wire system developed by Schaeffler. It allowed Dumas to place the car precisely where he needed it, often while ascending precarious and near-vertical slopes.
During an exclusive test drive on the return journey from Chile, you at least get a bit of a feel for this most extreme 911s.
Straight-away you feel the heat inside the cramped co*ckpit. The sound of the uninsulated engine echoes off narrow gorges, while inside you can hear the chassis creaking like a roof truss in a gale.
The car forces the driver into contortions as it bucks and twists across the terrain, clanging into knee-deep holes on the track or rumbling over boulders the size of footballs.
Edith did not let such adversities slow her down, because this lady is not for turning.
In the end both 911s had a few scars and were covered in a layer of thick volcanic dust, but were otherwise ready to perform the same feat all over again.
Performance: Porsche 911 Altitude "Edith"
