“Well, sometimes Ledwinka looked over my shoulder and sometimes I looked over his.”
–Ferdinand Porsche on designing the Volkswagen
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My first car was a Volkswagen Beetle. The design was already thirty years old—seven years older than I—and production would continue for another thirty-six years, making it the world’s longest-running automobile model. I bought mine in January 1967. After college, I’d worked and saved my money, and, as many young architects had done before me, I set out on a European grand tour.
My VW was seven years old, bought for $300 in Hamburg, where the freighter on which I had booked passage from Quebec City berthed. The car carried me and a friend without a hitch from Paris to Valencia (where it was stolen, but that’s another story). Nine hundred miles. I’d never driven a VW, but the controls were simplicity itself.
The enameled metal dashboard was dominated by a large speedometer that included an odometer, three warning lights—blue for the high beams, red for the generator, and green for low oil pressure—and an indicator for the flashing turn signal lights, which by 1960 had replaced the original semaphore indicators. There was no temperature gauge because the engine was air-cooled. There was no gas gauge, either—when the engine stuttered, it meant the tank was empty, which required flipping a lever below the dash to access the reserve—about a gallon, good for roughly forty miles. The dashboard included two unidentified white plastic pull knobs: the one on the left controlled the headlights; on the right, the windshield wipers. I believe that there was also a choke.
The turn signal was controlled by a stalk on the steering column, and the headlights were dimmed by depressing a floor switch. There was an ashtray, although no lighter. A knurled knob on the floor beside the stick shift controlled the heat, which came from an exchanger surrounding the exhaust pipe. The first time I stopped for gas, I looked in vain for the gas cap—I found it under the hood, which was actually a trunk, since the engine was in the rear.
I was reminded of my old VW the other day when my friend Jerry gave me a ride in his new Prius. Instead of a speedometer and traditional gauges, there was what Toyota calls a Multi-Information Display, an LCD touch screen swimming in icons, graphics, and numbers. The colorful array, which reminded me of a pinball machine, conveyed a range of technical information such as tire pressure and fuel consumption, as well as navigation and entertainment information and extraneous details such as time and date and whether a door was open. Somewhere, there was a number indicating the car’s speed.
The cost of adding digital information is minimal, and I had the impression that the designers had simply piled on the bells and whistles. Perhaps that’s why Jerry’s owner’s manual was almost eight hundred pages (compared to ninety for a 1960 VW), twenty pages just on operating the lights and wipers. Jerry told me his dealer offered a course for new owners on how to manage the complicated display. No doubt one got used to the busy flat screen, but I would miss the elegant minimalism of that old VW.
Hitler called on the auto industry to produce an affordable people’s car, a volkswagen.
The car I bought in Hamburg had distinctive oval German export license plates, and an international registration sticker marked with a D, for Deutschland. As I drove through Holland on my way to Paris, more than once when asking for directions I received dirty looks, especially from older persons for whom the wartime German occupation was a living memory.
And, after all, my car’s godfather was Adolf Hitler himself. Opening the 1933 Berlin Motor Show as the newly appointed reich chancellor, he had announced a national policy to motorize Germany, which despite having invented the automobile a half century earlier, lagged other European countries in car ownership. Hitler called on the auto industry to produce an affordable people’s car, a volkswagen.
The automotive engineer who would realize Hitler’s vision was not a German native. Ferdinand Porsche (1875–1951) was born in the small Bohemian market town of Maffersdorf in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; after the First World War, he would become a citizen of the newly created Czechoslovak Republic. Young Porsche worked in his father’s tinsmith shop and attended evening classes at the local polytechnic college. The boy was fascinated by electricity, and built his own generator, making the Porsche home the first in town to have electric light.
At the age of eighteen, thanks to the recommendation of a local businessman, the precocious youngster was apprenticed to Béla Egger, a Viennese manufacturer of electrical equipment. Four years later, Egger began a collaborative project to develop an electric automobile with Jacob Lohner & Company, an established luxury coach builder. Porsche, who had risen in the company, was charged with the design of the motor and drivetrain.
At the time that Egger and Lohner started their project, it was far from clear which motive power was best suited to the automobile: steam, gas-fired internal combustion, or electricity. Many argued for steam, which had the advantage of being a tried and true technology—after all, James Watt’s steam engine dated from 1776—and steam had been used to power tractors, omnibuses, and fire trucks since the mid-nineteenth century. Not only were steam engines safe and reliable, and mechanically straightforward, but steam could be produced by burning kerosene, which—unlike gasoline—was widely available.
One of the pioneers was the Frenchman Amédée Bollée (1844–1917), whose steam-powered omnibus, called L’Obéissante (the Obedient One), could carry twelve passengers. In 1873, Bollée demonstrated its effectiveness by driving from his native Le Mans to Paris. It took him eighteen hours to make the 150-mile journey, with stops for meals, for replenishing the boiler, and not least for speeding tickets (the vehicle had a top speed of twenty-five miles per hour), although the fines were rescinded following Bollée’s triumphant arrival in Paris.
The disadvantage of a steam-powered vehicle was the heavy boiler, which needed constant attention, and the external combustion steam engine, which was considerably less efficient than an internal combustion gasoline-powered engine. What is widely considered the world’s first successful internal combustion–engine motorcar was built by Carl Benz (1844–1929) in 1885. The vehicle resembled a large tricycle: the padded bench was supported on a tubular-steel frame, and the three wire-spoked wheels had solid rubber tires. A single front wheel did the steering; the two large back wheels were powered by a chain drive connected to a small one-cylinder, four-stroke internal combustion engine of Benz’s own design.
Producing less than one horsepower, and stabilized by a horizontal flywheel, the engine was sufficient to power the six-hundred-pound vehicle at ten miles per hour. Steering was by means of a tiller, while a hand lever applied power or brakes—there was no throttle. A knob beneath the seat adjusted the carburetor, a device that mixed air and fuel prior to combustion.
The Benz Patent-Motorwagen went into production the following year. Sales were slow, and to help generate publicity—and without Benz’s knowledge—in August 1888 his wife, Bertha (1849–1944), whose dowry had financed the project, drove a prototype from Mannheim, where the family lived, to her native town of Pforzheim, sixty-five miles away. There were, of course, no gas stations, and she stopped at a pharmacy to purchase bottles of petroleum ether, a cleaning fluid, to use as fuel. Bertha was accompanied by her two teenage sons. The historic journey took twelve hours, and on uphill stretches the boys had to get out and push.
The internal combustion engine was not an overnight success. Cars powered by electric motors were quieter and simpler to build and operate since electric motors did not require gears. The Egger-Lohner electric car that the young Porsche worked on was a tall four-seater whose large wooden-spoked wheels, sprung body, and folding canvas top resembled a traditional phaeton coach—it would be a few more years before automobile bodies assumed a distinctive form.
The large rear wheels were powered by a three-horsepower electric motor situated behind the axle, and the vehicle had a top speed of about twenty miles per hour. A box under the rear bench seat housed the batteries. Batteries were the electric car’s weak spot. The Egger-Lohner’s batteries provided a limited range—about fifty miles. Moreover, at a time when electrification was confined to cities, anyone taking a drive in the country risked getting stranded. And batteries were heavy; the Egger-Lohner’s seventy-four-cell lead-acid batteries added up to almost a third of the vehicle’s three-thousand-pound weight. That meant sluggish performance, especially when climbing hills, as well as heavy wear on the pneumatic tires.
Semper Vivus. Image courtesy of author.
The Egger-Lohner electric car was one of the first automobiles in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but although four prototypes were built, the car did not go into production. Nevertheless, the Lohner company, recognizing Porsche’s obvious talent, recruited him to be the head designer of its newly formed electric car division. Earlier, when he had been working at Egger, Porsche attended an evening class at Vienna’s Technical University, and to ease his bicycle commute he built a small hub-mounted electric motor to drive the rear wheel. It was an impressive feat for a tinkering teenager.
Porsche subsequently patented an electric hub motor suitable for automobiles. Driving the wheels directly with small motors reduced weight and did away with the need for a transmission, which increased efficiency. One of Lohner’s early electric cars was a custom-built racing car for a wealthy Englishman that used four hub motors, one on each wheel. The ponderous vehicle, which included a massive battery weighing almost two tons, has been described as a battery box on wheels.
To reduce the battery size, and overcome the electric car’s limited range, Porsche began to work on a car whose electric motor was backstopped by an internal combustion engine—in other words, a hybrid. Each of the two front wheels of the three-passenger vehicle was powered by a 2.7-horsepower electric hub motor that was connected to a forty-four-cell lead-acid battery, about half the size of the one in the Egger-Lohner car. The battery was housed in a box suspended beneath the steel chassis with shock-absorbing springs to safeguard the delicate lead plates. The battery was capable of powering the wheel-hub motors for about fifty miles, at which point the driver flipped a switch that started a pair of small one-cylinder water-cooled internal combustion engines located behind the driver’s seat (the radiators were mounted on two sides of the front cowling).
Each engine ran a generator that provided power to one of the hub motors as well as charging the battery. Once the battery was charged, the engines could be turned off. The rudimentary dashboard had two dials, a voltmeter and an ammeter. A lever varied the current flow, which controlled the speed; a steering wheel controlled the front wheels. The range of the hybrid vehicle, which had a top speed of about twenty miles per hour, was effectively unlimited, and Lohner named it the Semper Vivus—“Always Alive.”
The ingenious Semper Vivus, which today would be called a “concept car,” was displayed at the 1900 Paris Exposition, where it was a public sensation and won a gold medal. Lohner used the hybrid system on large vehicles such as fire trucks and buses, and also manufactured a passenger car version, although the expensive car sold primarily to wealthy enthusiasts. Porsche, a keen motor racer, built a successful hybrid racing car using hub motors on all four wheels.
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Adolf Hitler never learned to drive. Nevertheless, he was an avid car enthusiast and was interested in racing. At the 1933 Berlin Auto Show, when he unveiled his plan to motorize the nation with an affordable small car, he also announced a state-sponsored program to make Germany the European leader in motor racing. Porsche had not forsaken his interest in racing, and his firm had developed a design for a mid-engine racing car with a teardrop shape and a powerful supercharged sixteen-cylinder engine.
Porsche had formed a partnership with the newly founded Auto Union (the future Audi), and several months after the Berlin show, he and representatives of the company met with Hitler to seek financial support from the government. With their shared interest in automobiles—and their shared Viennese background—Porsche and Hitler hit it off. Auto Union got its funding, and its racing cars, as well as those of Daimler-Benz, handily dominated the European Grand Prix circuit for the rest of the decade. More important, Porsche established a rapport with the reich chancellor.
Linking the car to leisure was logical in a densely populated country with good public transportation.
The leading German car manufacturers were not enthusiastic about Hitler’s proposed budget car, but they felt obliged to respond to his challenge, and their trade association commissioned Porsche’s firm to produce a design. Hitler had provided exacting specifications: the car should accommodate two adults and three children; it should have an air-cooled engine; it should be able to maintain a cruising speed of 100 kilometers per hour (61 miles per hour); and gas consumption should not be more than seven liters per 100 kilometers (33.6 miles per gallon).
Last and not least, the selling price should not exceed a thousand Reichsmarks, about $400. The cheapest American car in 1935, a full-size Ford four-passenger sedan with a V8 engine, sold for less than $500, but that was in a country with a market that supported large-scale mass production. The least expensive German car—a small Opel—cost almost 1,500 Reichsmarks, so reducing that price by one-third was going to be a challenge.
Porsche’s team quickly produced a prototype. Ferdinand Porsche was not someone who cut corners, and thanks to his advanced engineering refinements, the final cost of the car turned out to be 1,450 Reichsmarks. The disappointed trade association called a halt to the project, but Porsche went behind its back, and in July 1936, he and his assistants drove two prototypes up to the Berghof, Hitler’s Bavarian mountain retreat. Hitler loved the little cars, and on the spot he offered Porsche a contract to refine and finalize the design. Both men chose to ignore the question of the elevated selling price.
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Hitler approved Porsche’s budget car design in 1936, and the next two years saw the construction of thirty prototypes (hand-built by Daimler-Benz) that were put through grueling pre-production test runs aimed at lowering maintenance and running costs. By 1938, the design was finalized. The two-door five-seater was powered by a twenty-five-horsepower four-cylinder air-cooled rear engine that could drive the car at sixty miles per hour for extended periods. The compact power plant was a so-called boxer engine, in which the cylinders were located on either side of a central crankshaft, and the pistons of each opposed pair of cylinders moved inward and outward at the same time.
This type of engine had been invented more than forty years earlier by Carl Benz and had been used in the Tatra V570 and the Mercedes-Benz 120, but Porsche’s car also included more recent features, such as a modified backbone chassis, which used the backbone to house the transmission, compact torsion bars instead of conventional coil or leaf springs, and four gears instead of the two or three that were common in budget cars. Heating was standard, which was also uncommon at a time when heaters were generally an optional extra.
The design of the all-steel body was the responsibility of Erwin Komenda (1904–1966), an Austrian engineer whom Porsche had recruited from Steyr. The characteristic curved hood resembled the NSU T32, and the streamlined rear recalled the Zündapp T12, but both features were now smoothly integrated into an appealing bug-like form. Komenda pared away everything that was extraneous. The flowing, sinuous curves recall the earlier Art Deco style, the sculptures of Josef Lorenzl, the paintings of Tamara de Lempicka, and the glass objects of René Lalique. “Timeless classic” is a shopworn term, but in this case it applies.
Tatra V570. Image courtesy of the author.
Hitler had given up on the foot-dragging private car companies and determined that his car should be manufactured by an entirely new concern. The funding would be provided by the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front), which the Third Reich had created as a replacement for the banned trade unions. The Labor Front’s leisure arm, called Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy), provided affordable vacations for working families and operated its own mountain retreats and beach resorts, even its own cruise ships. The new car was attached to this program and became known as the Kraft durch Freude Wagen, or KdF-Wagen. Linking the car to leisure was logical in a densely populated country with good public transportation—the KdF-Wagen was likely to be used chiefly for holidays and Sunday drives on the newly built autobahns. The first advertisements showed motorists picnicking and camping.
The KdF-Wagen was manufactured under Ferdinand Porsche’s direction in a brand-new factory in the village of Fallersleben in Lower Saxony. The giant plant was to produce 150,000 KdF-Wagens per year, and triple that number in five years. The adjacent new company town was called Stadt des KdF-Wagens bei Fallersleben (renamed Wolfsburg in 1945). Only 630 cars were produced before war broke out and civilian car production ceased. The factory shifted to military vehicles, as well as a variety of armaments, including the notorious V-1 flying bombs. More than half of the factory workers were forced labor, chiefly from Eastern Europe.
Although the Fallersleben factory was bombed during the war, most of the assembly line survived. There was talk of shipping the machinery abroad as war reparations, but British car manufacturers were not interested. Fallersleben was in the British sector of occupied Germany, and when the factory reopened in 1945, it was managed by the British Army and produced KdF-Wagens for the military. Eventually, production shifted to civilian models, and in 1949 the plant reverted to German management.
Production of the rechristened Volkswagen increased rapidly, and by the mid-1950s the millionth VW came off the assembly line. That car incorporated such mechanical improvements as a slightly larger engine, and offered superior performance compared to the original—a top speed of almost seventy miles per hour. But, except for the quarter-glass vent windows and the oval that replaced the rear split “pretzel” window of the prewar cars, it was the same bug-like design. That was the car that took me from Hamburg to Valencia.
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Excerpted from The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car by Witold Rybczynski. Copyright © 2024. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.
