It`s difficult to say exactly what the beginning of the Porsche story is. It may be in 1950, when the famous Max Hoffman introduced the Porsche 356 to the United States. Or maybe in 1948 when the first automobile to bear the name Porsche was introduced.  But in order to understand Porsche’s heritage and its philosophy we need to go back to 1875, when, in September, at the home of a metal worker in the Bohemian village of Haffersdorf, a boy was born named Ferdinand Porsche.

Since his youth, Ferdinand Porsche had shown glimpses of technical and mechanical aptitude and genius: at the age of 18, he wired the family home for electricity in 1893. Still, he didn’t show many signs of disciplined engineering skills that would eventually become his trademark. Even if the “Doctor” is usually added to his name, it is basically honorary, as his only formal technical education was as a part-time engineering student in Vienna.

By the age of 25, the young Ferdinand Porsche had commenced in the field of automotive design. His first car design was accepted by Lohner & Co. of Vienna. During the next 20 years, Ferdinand Porsche, the temperamental but brilliant auto engineer succeeded in associating with every major automobile maker in Germany. At the same time, he also designed a dozen of the most technically significant cars in history.

Working for Mercedes-Benz, he assisted in the development of the most revered Mercedes-Benz cars of all time: the SSK series. For NSU, he designed Auto Union Wanderer and the Type 32, a fore-runner to the Volkswagen Beetle.

After being dismissed from Mercedes for disagreeing with the company’s staid engineering policies, Porsche decided to establish what later became Porsche A.G.: his own engineering consulting group. In a small office in Stuttgart, the senior Dr. Porsche gathered a select group of engineers to work under the dramatic name, “Doctor of Engineering Ferdinand Porsche, Inc., Construction Facility for Land, Air, and Sea Transportation.” One of his employees was his youthful son, Ferry. His most important interest was one that any young man would opt for: sports cars and racing cars

The senior Dr. Porsche and his team were kept extremely busy. The consulting firm developed for Steyr (now the utility-vehicle wing of the Steyr- Daimler-Puch combine), the Austria luxury sedan, but it did not progress beyond the prototype stage.  They worked a lot for Auto Union, now Audi: the company developed the Front, the world’s first front wheel drive economy car. They astonished Auto Union with the mid-engine Grand Prix cars and their supercharged V-12 and V-16 engines which, together with Mercedes- Benz racers, dominated European auto racing for almost a decade.

After that, the firm created its best-known designs for NSU and Zundapp. The pair of prototypes was characterized by Dr. Porsche’s patented torsion-bar suspension and a rear-mounted engine. Since neither company moved rapidly enough to manufacture the designs, Porsche sold the concept to the German government. Then, he supervised the construction of a car manufacturing plant on Wolfsburg to manufacture the design. In his concept drawings, the car was called the Type 60. The world came to know this car as the Volkswagen Beetle.

After the second World War, the Porsche Company started to create vehicles branded with the Porsche name, and so the name became known world wide. Now, nearly a century later, Porsche has become an automotive marque and the Porsche family credited with creating outstanding, often unique and enduring contributions to automotive engineering and design.