Marat Pashkevich on Drift Cars, Porsche Tech, and a Three-Pedal Comeback

Marat Pashkevich has spent more than 20 years in the automotive industry. He built drift cars in high school, helped build wide-body Porsches and armored SUVs in his early twenties, and trained Porsche dealers across the South on digital sales. Today he works with Anaphora, a Swedish tech company whose platform is used by every Porsche center in the world.

He also survived a spinal cord injury in 2009 and was given about a 1% chance of recovery. He drove to The Ride Lounge in a manual 997. On this episode of Throttlecast, he talks with Grant Brewer about the car business, the recovery, and why he’ll never sell that Porsche.

August 10, 2009

Marat had played 18 years of ice hockey and spent years powerlifting. He was a week away from his last semester of business school. At a hockey teammate’s pool, he dove from the shallow end, misjudged the angle, and hit bottom at four and a half feet. The impact burst his C5 vertebra and cut into his spinal cord.

He remembers all of it. He couldn’t move and couldn’t reach the surface, and he spent close to three minutes underwater before his friend Michael pulled him up. His first words were to ask to be stabilized.

“I was given about a 1% chance for recovery,” he says. His father, a neurologist, put together a recovery protocol and started it within the first two weeks. Marat spent about four years in and out of the hospital, then three more years of physical and occupational therapy, relearning how to do everything.

He walks today. Some days he walks with a limp because of tightness in his body. Part of his hand therapy was getting back to building cars. One was a 1994 RX-7 with a big turbo, making high-400s horsepower at the wheels, the wildest of the three RX-7s he’s owned.

From a sweaty shop floor to the business side

Marat was deep in cars before he finished high school. His senior year, he worked at a shop in Dallas, Georgia, building Nissan 240SX drift cars, back when the Southeast Drift Association was just getting started in 2004 and 2005. Before his accident, he was working at a JDM tuning shop in Alpharetta and helping import cars from Japan.

After the accident he started slowly. Through the Luxury4Play forum he connected with TopCar, where he helped build the first Panamera and Cayenne wide-body cars in the US, and with the armored-car maker Dartz. He and a partner helped put together the deal with Paramount Pictures to build the three gold armored SUVs for The Dictator. He was 22 to 24 years old.

What moved him from wrenching to the business side was the Atlanta summer. A 110-degree shop gets old fast when the Porsche dealership down the road is climate-controlled. The early days of online parts sales and car listings pulled him toward tech, and mixing cars with technology became his specialty.

Training Porsche dealers to sell online

He went agency-side for Mercedes-AMG, building the AMG Private Lounge, which he believes is still the largest owners-only community any carmaker has run. The job took him to the Nürburgring to watch a VLN race.

Then came Shift Digital, which Porsche Cars North America hired to build a digital program for its dealers. Marat says the interview was the toughest of his life. He was responsible for 56 dealers from El Paso to Virginia Beach to Miami, and in 2019 he spent more than 260 days on the road. When COVID closed showrooms, the job became teaching dealers to sell cars online, with personalized videos and walk-arounds that have since caught on everywhere.

He later ran technology and sales operations for Indigo Auto Group, which he describes as the largest holder of Porsche dealerships in the US. There he helped launch a new Ferrari store and build another from scratch.

What Anaphora does

Marat explains Anaphora through a common frustration. A luxury brand spends heavily to make its website beautiful. The dealer site carries the look forward. Then you submit a lead on a $200,000 car and get a plain black-and-white email from the dealer’s CRM. He calls that a break in the experience.

Anaphora is a brand engagement platform for email, SMS, and events such as test drives and vehicle launches. It takes in a brand’s design language and builds a design kit that stays on brand. He says he can train almost any employee to use it in 15 minutes.

• Who uses it: every Porsche center in the world, plus Lamborghini, Aston Martin, and Koenigsegg, with more work underway among Ferrari dealers.
• Where it’s headed: powersports, marine, and luxury retail. It already works with two champagne houses. The goal is to be a household name in the way Salesforce and SAP are.
• Where it’s taken him: Zagato’s factory in Italy, the Lamborghini Lounge in Chelsea, the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este on Lake Como, and a tour of Ruf, which he calls a childhood dream.

He never pictured a Swedish tech startup getting him involved with these brands at this level.

Why a 997 is the last analog Porsche

His car is a 2005 997 in Seal Grey Metallic with the factory aero kit, extended leather, and a manual gearbox. It has coilovers, a Fabspeed exhaust, a ducktail, semi-solid motor mounts, and JDM Advan wheels, because he likes a little JDM in anything he drives. He puts it in the high 300s at the wheels. The IMS work is done.

To Marat, the 997 is the last analog Porsche. The 991 is bigger and has more computers behind it. This one is small enough that you feel everything.

Driving a three-pedal car again meant relearning heel-toe downshifts. People who see him walk are sometimes surprised when he steps out of it. “I’ll never give this car up,” he says.

Rapid fire

• Best Porsche ever made: Carrera GT.
• 997 or 993 for life: 997.
• The car that surprised him most: the Ferrari F12, for how raw it felt.
• The car he still wants: a Carrera GT, or a Pagani Zonda. He’s also hunting for an R34 Skyline.
• Strongest brand DNA: Porsche, for how it builds excitement from the factory down to grassroots events run by dealers.
• Most underrated: Aston Martin’s lineup, including the manual V8 Vantage.

What he wants you to take from it

Asked for a belief about recovery that people push back on, Marat doesn’t hesitate. “Your mind is the most powerful recovery weapon,” he says, along with belief in yourself and positive thinking.

For him, success now means inspiring and motivating as many people as possible and giving back. He treats every second as something to value, good or bad, because it can be taken away. Even getting in the car, driving to the lounge, and sitting down to talk is, in his words, one of the most beautiful things.

Watch the full episode

The full conversation with Marat Pashkevich is above and on YouTube.

Marat’s 997 is a car you keep for life, and cars like that deserve to be kept right. The Ride Lounge offers climate-controlled car storage in Peachtree Corners and Midtown Atlanta, with monitored bays and a lounge where Throttlecast is recorded. Schedule a private tour to see it in person.