Porsche has taken an interest in those trying to make an extra profit on its new GT cars, Car and Driver reports. The Stuttgart-based automaker says it plans to crack down on those flipping their rarer GT cars right off the dealership floor.

Flipping new Porsches is not a new trend, per se -- there have always been limited-edition variants or simply high-demand models that the market was crazy enough about to pay speculators -- with these entrepreneurial buyers stashing away cars for a few weeks in hopes of making a profit. Let's just recall the whole Speedster frenzy of the early 1990s or the very last air-cooled 993s.

One of the rarity factors motivating today's Porsche flippers is the availability of manual transmissions in the pricier models, once again feared as the "last of the line." Porsche’s head of GT road-car development Andreas Preuninger told Car and Driver the decision to offer a manual transmission in the new GT3 has rubbed owners of the manual-only 911R the wrong way -- they had been expecting the model to hold its value due to the presence of a stick shift. The debut of the latest GT3 has upset those who bought the car as an investment.

"I personally like to see my cars being used," Preuninger told Car and Driver at the launch of the 2018 911 GT3. "That's what we build them for. They are just too good to be left to stand and collect dust. I don’t like this business of people buying our cars to make money on them. That was never our intention. The purpose of limiting a car is not for it to gain value. We don’t want to be laying money on each car’s roof when they run out of the factory."

There isn't much automakers can normally do to stop this practice (unless cars are being shipped off to China, in which case European automakers will use U.S. government resources to protect their profits), but given the limited nature of the GT cars, Porsche says it keeps an eye on who is flipping the cars for profit and will take that into account when offering future limited-production GT specials.

"If you’re flipping cars, then I think it’s understandable that you won’t get on the list for the next car if we have more demand than supply,” Preuninger told Car and Driver. "It’s not a punishment but a strategy: to supply the cars to the customers who will really use them. I think that’s just fair."

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