The $1.6 Million Australian Coupe Built for the Driven

In a quiet workshop in inner city Melbourne, one of the most ambitious performance cars in Australia is being built by hand.

Limited to just 10 cars a year and priced at $1.6 million, the Zeigler/Bailey Z/B 4.4 is not designed to chase mass appeal.

It is built for a very specific kind of driver. One who wants feel over flash, engineering over hype, and a car with soul as well as speed.

The Z/B 4.4 takes visual cues from the classic air-cooled Porsche era of the late 1970s and 80s, but beneath the familiar silhouette sits an entirely new platform.

Rather than restoring or lightly modifying an old chassis, the team has replaced the floor and structure with a clean-sheet, motorsport-bred tub, engineered to modern Australian safety standards and designed to work in both right- and left-hand drive.

The result is a car that looks nostalgic, but behaves like a thoroughly modern performance machine.

Power comes from a bespoke 4.4-litre air-cooled flat-six engine, designed and assembled in-house and machined from solid aluminium billet.

With 300 kilowatts of power and 500 Newton-metres of torque, its output slightly surpasses that of today’s Porsche 911 Carrera, while retaining the raw sound and character of classic air-cooled engineering.

Much of the car’s suspension architecture is inspired by Le Mans prototype racing, with push-rod actuated dampers and a multi-link rear system designed to deliver both comfort and precision.

The electronics have also been built from scratch, using a solid-state CAN-bus architecture that allows for digital instrumentation, remote diagnostics and ongoing software updates.

Every Z/B 4.4 begins life as a donor Porsche 911 from the 1975 to 1989 G-series era. From there, almost everything mechanical, structural and electronic is reimagined. More than 3,500 bespoke parts go into each finished car.

Despite the engineering depth, this is not a track-only machine.

Owners are involved in the personalisation of colour, trim and finishes, with many choosing to take part in selected phases of the build itself. Seating, ride settings, digital displays and even engine tuning can all be adjusted to suit the driver.

Behind the project are entrepreneur and Porsche collector John Zeigler Jr and automotive engineer Greg Bailey.

Together, they have created not just a car, but a global low-volume manufacturing model, using advanced CNC machining and 3D printing to produce parts that would once have been impossible to fabricate locally.

The business now employs a specialised team of designers, engineers and assemblers, and has plans to scale internationally through engines, components and licensed assembly.

For collectors, the appeal is as much about rarity as performance. Only 10 cars a year will be built for the Australian market. Six are already sold. Delivery from order is about 12 months.

In a world where hypercars increasingly blur into one another, the Z/B 4.4 stands apart as something deeply personal and proudly Australian. It is not designed to dominate social media feeds or sit under velvet ropes. It is designed to be driven.

As the creators like to say, you do not buy cool. You build it.

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.

The $1.6 Million Australian Coupe Built for the Driven

Hand-built in Melbourne and limited to just 10 cars a year, the Zeigler/Bailey Z/B 4.4 is reshaping what a modern collector car can be.