The Astounding History Connected With Porsche

By Iva Dismore


The stories of how car manufacturers began are always interesting and Porsche is no different. Its founder was Ferdinand Porsche, who was a significant man for the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces in Germany. He played out an important role with building racing cars, tanks and airplanes. He had more than a thousand patents being an automobile engineer, and became chief engineer for Mercedes-Benz in the 1920s. Porsche later set up his own engineering workshop and designed the Volkswagen. He had been chief of operations for the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg and was interned there by the Allies toward the ending of World War II.

After he was released, Ferdinand and his son, Ferry, began developing the Porsche 356. The sports car was built with a rear-mounted, four-cylinder boxer engine that was much like the Volkswagen. Because it only reached a maximum of 87 mph, it was not precisely a powerful sports car. It had a forward thinking body, which was very elegant, and it was initially a convertible, and later a hard top. The Porsche 356 was assembled at a workshop that was possessed by a master of streamlined auto production named Erwin Komenda. Komenda worked along side with Porsche at Volkswagen and was a crucial person for design techniques and sheet metal.

Komenda designed the trendy closed coupe known as the fastback, which had become the symbol of the european sports car. Together with Porsche's grandson, Komenda pressed forward using fastback design by creating the Porsche 911. Having its attractive, sloping bonnet, the 911 turned out to be easily recognizable, especially with the frog eye headlights, the straight waistline, and curves running from the top edge of the windscreen to the rear bumper. Even though the style was comparable to the first Porsche, technically, it was more like the BMW 1500. While the model was a bit debatable, the 911 had become the symbol of what Porsche was all about.

Porsche the company nearly fell apart over the 70's and 80's when designers during the time tried to move too far beyond Porsche's classic designs. In no way living up to expectations were the 928, or the 924 produced with Volkswagen. However in the 1990's, they went back to their roots and became profitable again as they realized that the original designs were timeless. The long standing 911 sustained to push forward as almost forty people in the company worked on improving its technology. A good example is the extraordinary race car/sport car hybrid, 911 GTI which was put together by in-house designer, Anthony R Hatter.

The fresh Boxter create a new product line for Porsche in 1999. As typical of countless car companies, Porsche was able to weather a few heavy storms to the point of near collapse, only to return tougher than ever. They were capable to succeed at a transitional moment in the auto industry where major car companies were losing money and going bankrupt.




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