Classic Car Rental - Classic Car Hire
What would be a great classic car rental?, in my book the
Porche would be at the top of the list, here is why.
Porsche the beginning, It's hard to say exactly which is the
beginning of Porsche story. It could be in 1950, when the famous
Max Hoffman introduced the Porsche 356 to the United States. Or
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 tinsmith in the Bohemian village of
Haffersdorf, a son was born. His name was Ferdinand Porsche.
Since his adolescence, Ferdinand Porsche showed glimpses of
technical genius: at the age of 18, he wired family's home for
electricity in 1893. Still, he didn’t show many signs of
disciplined engineering skills that will eventually become his
trademark. Even if the “Doctor” is usually appended to his name,
it is in essence honorary, since his only formal technical
training was as a part-time engineering student in Vienna.
By the age of 25, the young Ferdinand Porsche had entered the
field of automotive design. His first car design was already
accepted by Lohner & Co. of Vienna. Over the next 20 years,
Ferdinand Porsche, the temperamental but brilliant engineer
succeeded in associating with every major automobile
manufacturer in Germany. At the same time, he designed a dozen
of the most technically significant cars in history.
Working for Mercedes-Benz, he helped develop the most revered
Mercedes-Benz cars of all time: the SSK series. For NSU, he
designed Auto Union Wanderer and the Type 32, a precursor of the
Volkswagen Beetle.
After being dismissed from Mercedes for disagreeing with the
firm'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 primary
interest was one that any young man might select: sports 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-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 nearly
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 oversaw the construction of a plant on
Wolfsburg to manufacture the design. His drawings called the car
the Type 60. The world came to know it as the Volkswagen Beetle
After the second World War, the Porsche Company started to
create vehicles that beard its name, and so became knows world
wide. Now, nearly a century later, Porsche became the marque and
the family that created outstanding, often unique and surely
lasting contributions to automotive engineering and design.
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