Porscheology – A History Of Porsche

What can we say about Porsche? A company widely renowned for their production of excellent luxury sports cars, Porsche have dominated the world of design and engineering for a long time now. Read more and discover the history behind one of the most successful and dependable car manufacturers in the world...

Beginning ever so slightly before the actual beginning

To get a better idea of how it all started, it’s probably best to go back before the company official beginnings in 1948. In fact, it’s best to start with company founder, Ferdinand Porsche (I wonder where he got the name for the company from?). Ferdinand, born in 1875, was an automotive engineer who created the world’s first gasoline-electric hybrid engine in 1900. The ‘Semper Vivus’ combined Ferdinand’s battery-powered wheel-hub motors with a gasoline engine, creating a full hybrid concept car that was capable of covering large distances. Not bad for a 25-year old.

Porsche Semper Vivus

Great things were on the way for Ferdinand Porsche; in 1905, he was awarded the Potting Prize as Austria’s most outstanding engineer. The following year, he was recruited by Austro-Daimler to become their chief designer, and designed the ‘Prince Henry’ car (also known by its official but less-catchy name, ‘Modell 27/80’) for the Prince Henry Trials in 1910. The 85 horsepower, streamlined Prince Henry triumphantly finished in all top three places with none other than Ferdinand Porsche at the wheel of the winning car.

Prince Henry - Modell 27/80

In 1916, Ferdinand became Managing Director of Austro-Daimler and continued to construct successful racing models. The small racing car he designed in 1922 – the Sascha model– beat bigger-engined competition in the 1922 Targa Florio race, and continued to triumph in 43 out of 53 races. All was well until a bust-up about the direction of future car development within the company caused Ferdinand to up and leave in 1923... He went on to become Technical Director at Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft in Stuttgard where he designed successful race car models that were to culminate in the Mercedes-Benz SSK, and was to witness the merge with the company with Benz & Cie and the beginning of Mercedes-Benz, before leaving again in 1929 to work for Steyr Automobile who then had to let him go anyway because of the current state of economic depression. But never fear, this was all paving the way for Ferdinand, Porsche and...

Mercedes SSK

 

...The actual beginning

On 25th April 1931, the Porsche design office was founded; or, as it was officially called in Stuttgart’s commercial register, ‘Dr. Ing. H. C. F. Porsche Gesellschaft mit beshränkter Haftung, Konstruktion und Beratung für Motoren und Fahrzeugbau’. You can see why the name-change happened.   Ferdinand Porsche recruited a number of former co-workers and friends, as well his son, Ferdinand Porsche (imaginative name -choosing Papa Porsche – luckily everyone called the younger Ferdinand ‘Ferry’ which will make writing this a whole lot easier).  This independent design and engineering firm didn’t actually build any cars under its own name, but instead offered motor vehicle development work and consulting. One of the first major projects – and definitely the most famous – was the assignment set by the German government to design a ‘car for the people,’ which of course culminated in the creation of Volkswagen (‘People’s Car’)Beetle. The resulting air-cooled, four-cylinder flat engine and body design would be used over and over again in the coming decades, and would be the base of the Porsche 64 in 1939, and the Porsche 356 (officially Porsche’s first car, more on that in a bit).

Porsche 64

World War II and the post-war years

Before father and son Porsche could get going on more fun car things, World War II happened. The company took on a number of projects for Hitler etc during the War, including the Elefant tank destroyer and the Tiger tank, and when the VW factory was seized by the British in 1945, Ferdinand senior was arrested for war crimes and imprisoned for 20 months. It was during this time that Ferry went car-shopping and decided there was nothing on the market that he fancied, so he’d just build one himself.  Thus, in 1947, the Type 356 VW Sports Car was born. The first models of this car were apparently built in a small sawmill in Austria, and the ‘356’ refers the construction number of the model (apparently Ferry was a firm believer in the saying, ‘if at first you don’t succeed...’). The 356 made its debut in 1948 (and won its first race at the Innsbruck Stadtrennen merely a month after exiting the factory doors), and became known as the first official car to be created by the father and son duo. The lightweight roadster only had 40 horsepower and a maximum speed of 87 mph coming from what was affectively a jazzed-up Beatle engine, but it still garnered a good reputation based on its reliability and agile handling. In 1951 Ferdinand Porsche senior died, and Ferry continued the adventure he’d started with his father alone.

Porsche 356

Successful growth in the fifties and sixties

1953 saw the Spyder 550 introduced to the world at the 1953 Paris Auto Show, a racing car designed by Ferry that had plenty of success in races to keep up Porsche’s reputation. In 1956, the 10,000th Porsche was built, and a few years later the company had to outsource body production to keep up with the ever-growing demand.

Porsche 550 Spyder

The successor to the 356, the legendary Porsche 911, made its debut in 1964. Like the Porsches before it, it was an air-cooled, rear-engined sports car, but this time it had an all-new 2 litre, 130-hp six-cylinder engine. Kapow. The design team that created the 911 was headed by Ferry’s eldest son, Ferdinand (no.3, not that we’re counting). The new model was an instant hit, and remains, to this day, a classic icon in the motoring world that will forever epitomise the Porsche brand. In 1964 production began; soon it was winning rallies and race left right and centre.

Porsche 911 (1963)

No longer a family affair

In 1972, Porsche changed the form of the company from a limited partnership to a public limited company, as Ferry Porsche believed the scale of the company had now outgrown the family operation it had once been. In truth, he was most likely annoyed at having so many relatives called Ferdinand working about the place, and probably just wanted to make things less confusing. It worked anyway, and most family members left the company around this time. The seventies and eighties were frankly – in terms of prior success and creativity – not the most interesting years the company saw.  The 924 ‘people’s Porsche’ model that was developed with Volkswagen and the grand sportswagon 928 (which the CEO initially planned to replace the 911) were both flops in comparison to classic cars from previous decades.

Porsche 928

Let us fast-forward to the nineties, when Porsche became the first car manufacturer to fit driver and passenger airbags on all of its cars. Nice one, Porsche.  They also decide to sack in the failed experiments with front-mounted engines and get back to revamping and developing their most popular model, the 911. The concept for the Boxster, a mid-engine sports car, is also unveiled in 1993 and after huge amounts of positive feedback is developed for the market, taking three and a half years in the process. This decade also sees the arrival of the new 911 Turbo, as well as the one-millionth Porsche being built in July of 1996. Two years later, at the age of 88, Ferry Ferdinand died.

Porsche 911 Turbo

The new millennium and beyond...

The new millennium saw success after success for the car manufacturer, like the debut of the Porsche 911 GT2 with a top track speed of 195 mph. It also saw the company branching out to the SUV market with the unconventional but surprisingly successful Cayenne and the versions that followed, as well the four-door sports sedan, the Panamera. 

Porsche Cayenne

In 2009, Porsche and Volkswagen form an alliance in which the car manufacturing operations of both companies would merge in the following few years to make the ‘Integrated Automotive Group’ and involve a weird deal which involves both companies being majority-owned by each other. Whatever, it’s working. In 2013, the company celebrated fifty years of the 911 (of course, releasing a special anniversary model), and in 2015, Porsche took the overall victory at Le Mans; proof that Porsche still has it sorted on the track and the road (and definitely in the bank). The brand has been a force to be reckoned with in the car manufacturing world for the best part of a century now, and with a current line-up including the 911, Boxter, Cayman, Cayenne, Macan, Panamera and not forgetting the 918 Supercar, we’re excited to see what happens next. Bring it on, Porsche.

Porsche 918

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