Porsche the beginning


It`s hard to say exactly which is the beginning of Porsche 
story. It could be in 1950, when the famous Max Hoffman 
introduced the Porsche 356 to the United States. Or in 1948 
when the first automobile to bear the name Porsche was introduced.  
But in order to understand Porsche’s heritage and its philosophy 
we need to go back to 1875, when, in September, at the home 
of a tinsmith in the Bohemian village of Haffersdorf, a son was 
born. His name was Ferdinand Porsche.

Since his adolescence, Ferdinand Porsche showed glimpses of 
technical genius: at the age of 18, he wired family's home for 
electricity in 1893. Still, he didn’t show many signs of disciplined 
engineering skills that will eventually become his trademark. Even 
if the “Doctor” is usually appended to his name, it is in essence 
honorary, since his only formal technical training was as a part-time 
engineering student in Vienna.

By the age of 25, the young Ferdinand Porsche had entered the 
field of automotive design. His first car design was already 
accepted by Lohner & Co. of Vienna. Over the next 20 years, 
Ferdinand Porsche, the temperamental but brilliant engineer 
succeeded in associating with every major automobile manufacturer 
in Germany. At the same time, he designed a dozen of the most 
technically significant cars in history. 

Working for Mercedes-Benz, he helped develop the most revered 
Mercedes-Benz cars of all time: the SSK series. For NSU, he 
designed Auto Union Wanderer and the Type 32, a precursor of the 
Volkswagen Beetle. 

After being dismissed from Mercedes for disagreeing with the firm's 
staid engineering policies, Porsche decided to establish what later 
became Porsche A.G.: his own engineering consulting group. In a 
small office in Stuttgart, the senior Dr. Porsche gathered a select 
group of engineers to work under the dramatic name, "Doctor of 
Engineering Ferdinand Porsche, Inc., Construction Facility for Land, 
Air, and Sea Transportation." One of his employees was his youthful 
son, Ferry. His primary interest was one that any young man might 
select: sports and racing cars

The senior Dr. Porsche and his team were kept extremely busy. The 
consulting firm developed for Steyr (now the utility-vehicle wing of the 
Steyr- Daimler-Puch combine), the Austria luxury sedan, but it did not 
progress beyond the prototype stage.  They worked a lot for Auto 
Union, now Audi: the company developed the Front, the world's first 
front-drive economy car. They astonished Auto Union with the mid-engine 
Grand Prix cars and their supercharged V-12 and V-16 engines 
which, together with Mercedes- Benz racers, dominated European auto 
racing for nearly a decade. 

After that, the firm created its best-known designs for NSU and Zundapp. 
The pair of prototypes was characterized by Dr. Porsche's patented 
torsion-bar suspension and a rear-mounted engine. Since neither 
company moved rapidly enough to manufacture the designs, Porsche 
sold the concept to the German government. Then, he oversaw the 
construction of a plant on Wolfsburg to manufacture the design. His 
drawings called the car the Type 60. The world came to know it as the 
Volkswagen Beetle

After the second World War, the Porsche Company started to create vehicles 
that beard its name, and so became knows world wide. Now, nearly a 
century later, Porsche became the marque and the family that created 
outstanding, often unique and surely lasting contributions to automotive 
engineering and design.

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