From a small designer’s office to the best-known sports car brand in the world: Ferdinand Porsche and his early colleagues were special mobility pioneers.
The Porsche P1 was already electric in 1930, the first hybrid drive made its debut in the Lohner-Porsche, the evolution chain from the NSU-Porsche to the VW Beetle the Porsche 356 would be described today as a modular basic architecture. The project list of the busy think tank ranged from the racing car to the Kübelwagen to the tank.
In a way, the first Porsche sports car was a waste product of the first Beetle, paid for by Wolfsburg and repurposed for little money. After the war, it took 15 years until the last of 76,000 Porsche 356s came off the assembly line in 1965.
The real upswing began with the 911 launched in 1963. The air-cooled four-cylinder was actually sitting far too far back, and the driving characteristics could be insidious at times. But the design was cult right away, the fan base grew with every leap in performance, and at some point, the lightweight 911s were on par with the competition from Italy and England.
The disagreement between the Porsche and Piëch families always gave the company new decision-makers. Ernst Fuhrmann was the tech-savvy pragmatist and father of the 928. We owe the American Peter W. Schutz the 944 and the first open 911. Heinz Branitzki and Arno Bohn were rather pale administrators in difficult economic times. The adorable four-door 989 was just one of many models that fell through the cracks at the time.
With Cayenne and Panamera for new growth
The defining appearance at the top of the company was undoubtedly the savings champion Wendelin Wiedeking, who with Boxster / Cayman and 911 again put the sports car portfolio on two legs. At the same time, Porsche ventured into new growth segments with the Cayenne and Panamera. Although the attempt to swallow VW failed, the quirky poltergeist was considered the undisputed king in Porsche chess. Michael Macht, Matthias Müller and Oliver Blume followed. Motorsport runs like a red thread through the history of the brand. Only with the victories in the endurance world championship, in Le Mans and in formula racing did the motto “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” pay off in cash.
The Porsche present increasingly revolves around new brand values, the passion for driving that is sparked by more and more performance and the equally ambitious and sustainable product portfolio. This business model generates returns that other manufacturers – with the exception of Ferrari – can only dream of. Even relatively mundane products like the Macan, which is largely identical to the Audi Q5, cost 100,000 euros or more when fully equipped. The Porsche clientele apparently also ignored the fact that the Cayenne shares the genes with the comparatively staid VW Touareg.
The previously strictly focused core competence is now moving away from the purebred sports car and towards the sporty car, which may also be an SUV that consumes 30 liters and more at full load. Only Boxster and Cayman are worrying, because their margins are in the mid single digits, the cost structure partly depends on the much more expensive 911, and the segment has been weakening for years.
Porsche or not, regardless of the type of sportscar you like to drive, all of them require thorough cleaning. And you can only that with the Best Cordless Handheld Vacuum. For more about this story, read the full article at Sueddeutsche.