It's unlikely that you have not heard of the Porsche automobile; you may possibly have enjoyed a ride in one, or just maybe there's one of them parked in your driveway. Nevertheless, you may have only a vague idea of the history of the Porsche. The starting point of the Porsche car's history is difficult to pinpoint with any certainty. The earliest car to be called Porsche was released in 1948, and in 1950 Max Hoffman brought the Porsche 356 to the United States. For the culture and objectives of Porsche to be understood, you will need to go back to 1875, when a son was born in the house of a tinsmith in Haffersdorf, a Bohemian village.

Ferdinand Porsche was his name, and he had technical genius, but little indications of having engineering skills that were disciplined. He acquired part-time education as an engineering student in Vienna, for his only formal education, but at the age of 25, he became an automobile designer. He became a brilliant engineer, but moody, as he became linked to all of the leading car manufacturers in Germany, at one time or another. Porsche had been responsible for the type of a dozen of those cars that made breathtaking technical history. He served to build the SSK collection of Mercedes-Benz cars, one of the most revered of all time, when he worked for them.

An engineering consulting group, of latter-day Porsche AG fame, was initially established by Porsche after he was asked to leave Mercedes. He didn't get along with their own engineering policies, so he was dismissed. He established a group with several engineers he cherry-picked, with a special interest in racing cars and sports cars. On the list of undertakings among the numerous that they landed, was to develop the luxury sedan, the Steyr, for an Austrian firm. The furthest it got was to the prototype level. This special group also did a lot of work for Auto Union, which currently is Audi, the company that first developed economy cars with front-wheel drive.

Their organization designed the supercharged V-12 and V-16 engines for the mid-engine Grand Prix cars. Auto racing within the European circuit ended up being dominated by them, in conjunction with the Mercedes-Benz racer, for a period of nearly ten years. Sometime after that, NSU and Zundapp each used their best-known designs. Some well-known Porsche protoypes ended up being the torsion-bar suspension, branded by them, and the rear-mounted engine. Both companies were not quick enough for Porsche in taking the designs to the manufacturing stage, so the concept was sold by him to the German government. The creation of his design and style eventually happened at Wolfsburg, in a factory the building of which was supervised by Porsche. As part of his blueprints he called it the Type 60, nevertheless it became what we all know as the Volkswagen Beetle.

It is now more than a 100 years later, and the Porsche engineering firm has left its mark on the automobile industry. He and his family have certainly provided a long lasting and often unique contribution to the design and engineering of the automobile.