Porsche-the-beginning-

Porsche the beginning

It`s hard to say exactly which is the beginning of Porsche story. It could be in , when the famous Max Hoffman introduced the Porsche to the United States. Or in when the first automobile to bear the name Porsche was introduced. But in order to understand Porsches heritage and its philosophy we need to go back to , 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 , he wired family's home for electricity in . Still, he didnt 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 , 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 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 , 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- and V- 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 . 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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