Porsche - a brief history

Ferdinand Porsche played an important role in the development 
of airplanes and racing cars, and the construction of tanks for 
the Wehrmacht. He is an automobile engineer with more than 
a thousand patents to his name. He was appointed chief engineer 
at Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart in the 1920s. Later on, he set 
up his own engineering workshop and designed among others 
the Volkswagen. At the plant where Volkswagen was made, 
Wolfsburg, he was chief of operations and at the end of the war 
he was interned by the Allies.

He was released a few years later and started building his first car 
with his son, Ferry Porsche. The car was named the Porsche 356 
and it was a sports car and a reminiscent of the Volkswagen. 
It had the same four-cylinder boxer engine that was rear-mounted, 
just like the VW. It was far from being a powerful sports car, 
developing only 40 bhp and a maximum speed of 87 mph (140 km/h). 
First produced as a convertible and later as a hard top it distinguished 
by the very elegant and innovative body. It was developed in the
workshop of Erwin Komenda, a master of restrained streamlining 
who had been in charge of sheet metal and design techniques at 
Porsche since the VW Beetle.  The new style of closed coupe was 
designed by Komenda and it soon became the embodiment of the 
sports car, thanks to its fastback.

This tradition was continued by Komenda and Ferdinand “Butzi” 
Porsche, the founder’s grandson, with the 911. 

The 911 became easily recognizable: it had attractive sloping 
bonnet and what later became characteristic “frog eye” headlights, 
curves running from the top edge of the windscreen to the rear bumper 
and a straight waistline. From a functional and technical point of 
view it was more like BMW 1500, although it retained the stylistic 
features of the original Porsche. The new 911 will become the 
foundation stone of Porsche’s identity, even though the design 
was not always appreciated. During the 1970`s and 1980`s, the 
designers attempts to distance Porsche from its legendary design brought 
the company to the edge of disaster. The more modern 924 model, 
“a people’s Porsche”, developed with Volkswagen, as well as the 
928 were far from fulfilling the expectations. 

In the 1990`s, the company realized that what for over twenty years 
was perceived  as a straitjacket, it was in fact a market
advantage. During the 1990`s, Porsche became highly 
profitable since they now knew that the typical Porsche features 
were timeless. Nearly forty people now worked in the design 
department on further developments of the long-running 911. 
These developments included the 911 GTI, a powerful combination
of sports and racing car, put forward by the in-house designer 
Anthony R. Hatter. In 1999, chief designer proudly presented the 
new Boxster which enabled Porshe to establish a second 
independent range of models.

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