Carpokes Porsche Forum

Porsche often gets confusing until you break it down.

1) It's a car company, it makes it's money selling cars. If that's to work, it has to bend to the market whims. Good, and quite serendipitous example, P creating the 911 Targa because it thought the US would ban a cab.

2) Porsche builds luxury cars. True. My third Targa was an '85 911, very good condition, guards red, whale tail, etc.. When I asked the guy why he was selling, he told me he had thought Porsche's were luxury cars and he was disappointed that when he drove it he could "feel every nuance of the road." After two 914's, I thought that 911 was the pinnacle of luxury, but that is not why I bought it, I WANT to feel every nuance of the road.

3) Porsche is all about <automotive> engineering. The story was that Dr-Ingr Ferdinand Porsche could design a six cylinder and tranny that would outperform an eight and he did. He also designed the first hybrid, a fact that apparently was lost on the marque purity critics of Porsche's electrification.

4) Porsche is, at the end, all about performance. This is not just raw speed, but focussed on acceleration and handling and, well, there is no substitute. This is measured at the track, not the local Saturday night soirée of cars that look fast, but aren't. P does nothing in terms of design, appearance and features without complete integration into the performance picture.

5) Porsche considers the driver as part of the car and designs it that way. This is why when you get into your Porsche you feel like it has 'accepted you' as part of it (recall the Borg mandate: We will assimilate you) and it responds accordingly. If it doesn't, you are not meant for it.

6) The history of Porsche has spawned very different clades: the icon cult, the hedonists, the bohemians, the status seekers, the list goes on.

For me Porsche history can be divided into the Ferdinand Porsche early period, 1899 for so till 1932, the 1933-45 period and the establishment of the Porsche company as we know it in 1948.

Ferdinand Porsche was a pure play engineer and had been chief engineer for Austro_Daimler and Mercedes before basically getting canned after the merger of Daimler and Benz as he was not an easy guy to work with.Brilliant engineer though.

After that he started into independent design work and impressed Hitler which allowed him to design the Auto-Union GP car and of course the VW. He was briefly imprisoned in France after WW.2 and his health declined. By the time the Porsche company was founded he was is very poor health and died in 1950 just as the company was getting stabilized. Interestingly Ferry Porsche negotiated a deal with the VW CEO, Heinz Nordhoff to get a royalty on every VW sold in that period which provided financing for the fledgling Porsche company.

Really it was Ferry Porsche who built out the company that got going then. Of course there was an almost 50 year history of engineering innovation from the father which was the basic DNA of the new company. It has quite an interesting history. The Porsche museum really covers the post 1948 period, but Ernst Piëch, brother of Ferdinand Piëch has a fascinating museum called Fahr(T) Raum which had pretty much all of the Ferdinand Porsche cars from 1899 to 1945 except for the Auto Union GP cars which are in the Audi Museum and the Mercedes SSK cars in the DB Museum in Stuttgart which had Porsche designed engines..

RDMcG wrote: Sat Dec 20, 2025 2:16 pm Brilliant engineer though.

I personally consider him to be the GOAT (automotive that is, Tesla and Edison vie for electrical).

Fun fact: Porsche was the only person to be in the presence of the Führer and not remove his hat. Even Hitler wasn't crazy enough to not realize that you don't mess with unbridled genius.