In the 21st century, the Porsche name is associated with powerful and refined sports cars, high-performance sedans and SUVs, and total dominance in motorsports. It all started with one man: Ferdinand Porsche, an Austrian engineer and businessman. Far beyond the founding of his company, Ferdinand Porsche was a critical player in the evolution of the automobile and the establishment of a global car industry, earning him the posthumous title of Car Engineer of the Century .
Here’s how a young Austrian boy with no engineering degree shaped the automotive era. Ferdinand Porsche was born in 1875 in Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary, in what is now the Czech Republic. Young Ferdinand was fascinated by engineering and electricity.
As a teen, he worked in his father’s mechanic shop during the day, attending classes at Imperial Polytechnical College at night. At 18, Ferdinand Porsche was hired by Béla Egger & Co., a maker of electric motors in Vienna.
He constructed the company’s first electric hub motor, a self-contained motor unit built into its own wheel—a design used in e-bicycles and many other low-speed electric vehicles today. Around 1897, Porsche left Béla Egger & Co. for coachbuilder Jakob Lohner & Co.
in Vienna. The company made royal coaches for monarchs in Europe and England, and had just begun building electric horseless carriages. The company’s early vehicles showed great technical promise, but they were severely limited by the weight of their massive ba.
