The legends of how car producers began are always exciting and Porsche is no different. Porsche was begun by a key man for Germany’s unified armed forces named Ferdinand Porsche. He became a critical person for producing cars, airplanes and tanks. Being an auto engineer, he produced more than a thousand patents and throughout the 1920′s was the chief engineer at Mercedez-Benz. Right after Porsche left Mercedez-Benz, he setup an engineering workshop and also created the Volkswagen. He was the operations chief at a factory in Wolfburg that was manufacturing Volkswagens and was held there by Allies at the end of World War II.
A few years after he was released, Ferdinand Porsche and his son, Ferry, started building the Porsche 356. The sports car had a rear-mounted, four-cylinder boxer engine that was very similar to the Volkswagen. The top speed of the Porsche 356 was only 87 mph. Though it was not a speed demon, the car had a very elegant and innovative design as a convertible and, later, as a hard top. The Porsche 356 was put together at a workshop that was owned by a master of streamlined auto production named Erwin Komenda. Komenda performed services along side with Porsche at Volkswagen and was a critical person for design systems and sheet metal.
Komenda was important in developing a new style of closed coupe, referred to as the fastback, which is still prominent in today’s luxury sports cars. In conjunction with Porsche’s grandson, Komenda moved forward using fastback design by creating the Porsche 911. The 911 had been a gorgeous sports car equipped with frog eye headlights, straight waistline, a sloping bonnet and curves running from the windscreen to the rear bumper. Even though the style was comparable to the first Porsche, technically, it turned out more like the BMW 1500. As the style was a bit questionable, the 911 had become the symbol of what Porsche was all about.
Porsche the corporation 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. Examples of their failed attempt to get away from the past were the 928 and 924 which were co-developed with Volkswagen. But in the 1990′s, the company realized that the classic designs were timeless and that resulted in a resurgence to profitability. The long standing 911 continued to push forward as almost forty people in the company worked on advancing its technology. An example is the impressive race car/sport car hybrid, 911 GTI which was put together by in-house designer, Anthony R Hatter.
The new Boxter open up a new model line for Porsche in 1999. As typical of countless car companies, Porsche was able to weather many heavy storms to the point of next to collapse, only to return tougher than ever. They were capable of succeed at a transitional period in the auto industry where main car companies were losing money and going bankrupt. Watch porsche rims.