Porsche-a-brief-history-

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 s. 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 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 bhp and a maximum speed of mph ( 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 founders grandson, with the .

The 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 , although it retained the stylistic features of the original Porsche. The new will become the foundation stone of Porsches identity, even though the design was not always appreciated. During the `s and `s, the designers attempts to distance Porsche from its legendary design brought the company to the edge of disaster. The more modern model, a peoples Porsche, developed with Volkswagen, as well as the were far from fulfilling the expectations.

In the `s, the company realized that what for over twenty years was perceived as a straitjacket, it was in fact a market advantage. During the `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 . These developments included the GTI, a powerful combination of sports and racing car, put forward by the in-house designer Anthony R. Hatter. In , chief designer proudly presented the new Boxster which enabled Porshe to establish a second independent range of models.

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