Is RUF a Porsche tuner or a carmaker? Why it's had its own VIN since 1981

The short answer

RUF is not a tuner. Germany's Federal Motor Transport Authority certified RUF Automobile as an independent car manufacturer in 1981. That one piece of paper is why every RUF carries its own VIN, starting with the manufacturer code W09, instead of a modified Porsche chassis number. Brabus, Mansory, TechArt and Gemballa all start with a finished Porsche or Mercedes-Benz and hand it back with the original VIN intact. RUF, legally, builds a new car.

From repair shop to carmaker

Alois Ruf Sr set up Auto Ruf as a repair garage in Pfaffenhausen, Bavaria, in 1939. His son Alois Ruf Jr took over after his father's death and began building complete, heavily reworked Porsche 911s through the 1970s. The 1981 manufacturer recognition followed, and it mattered because it let RUF sell a car as a RUF, with its own type approval, rather than as a tuned Porsche that still legally belonged to Porsche.

For decades after that, RUF still used Porsche underpinnings. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s it bought bodies in white, bare, unpainted Porsche shells, from dealers and built its own cars around them. That is how the most famous RUF, the CTR, came to be.

The Yellowbird that made RUF's name

In 1987 RUF built the CTR, a narrow bodied car based on the 911 Carrera 3.2, and had it timed at 339 km/h, a record for a production car at the time. A year later, at a high speed test organised by the magazine Auto Motor und Sport at the Nardo ring in Italy, the same car hit 342 km/h, with an unofficial run touching 346 km/h. Journalists on that test nicknamed it the Yellowbird, after its colour, and the name stuck. About 29 CTRs were built from bodies bought straight from Porsche, with another 20 to 30 converted from customers' own Carreras, between 1987 and 1996.

RUF now builds its own chassis

The CTR Yellowbird was still a Porsche shell underneath RUF's own panels and engineering. That changed in 2007 with the CTR3, RUF's first car on a chassis and body it designed entirely itself. In 2017, for the Yellowbird's 30th anniversary, RUF showed a reborn CTR with a carbon fibre monocoque, built with the German engineering firm Vela Performance and sharing no parts with any Porsche.

What this means in India

RUF has no dealer, distributor or showroom in India, and has never sold a car here through any official channel. None of its Porsche based cars or its own chassis models such as the CTR3, CTR Anniversary or SCR are on any Indian price list.

Bringing one in privately runs into India's import rules for new foreign cars. For a car with a CIF value over 40,000 dollars, the effective duty load works out to 150 to 165 percent once customs duty, a luxury cess and other levies are added, which is why even an ordinary imported sports car more than doubles in price by the time it clears customs here. A RUF, built in runs as small as 30 cars, has never been through that process at all. If you see a RUF on Indian roads, it has arrived unofficially, and whoever brought it in has already paid a price RUF's own brochure never mentions.

Sources

• Porsche & RUF: How the Relationship Really Works, Tommycars
• Ruf Automobile, Wikipedia
• Ruf CTR, Wikipedia
• The 700 HP, 225 MPH, All Carbon RUF CTR Isn't Built Off A Porsche, Jalopnik
• RUF Automobile official site
• Import Cars Into India: Luxury Cars, Carnet, Duty Calculation Guide, Eximpe