{"id":29075,"date":"2018-05-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.secret-classics.com\/70-years-of-porsche\/"},"modified":"2020-10-02T16:14:26","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T16:14:26","slug":"70-years-of-porsche-four-cylinder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.secret-classics.com\/en\/70-years-of-porsche-four-cylinder\/","title":{"rendered":"70 Years of Porsche – The four-cylinder cars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At 8th<\/sup> of June sports car manufacturer Porsche will celebrate their 70th<\/sup> anniversary. This is more than one reason to take a deep look into their history and tell some stories. But all in one article would be a bit too much. So we start with the four-cylinder cars in this edition and will continue with the bigger engines later. In the beginning there were only four cylinders inside the very first Porsche.

Although Ferdinand Porsche founded his office for engineering and constructions in Stuttgart in the 1930s, the start point for Porsche as a sports car manufacturer is seen as the date when the very first Type 356 got licensed for the road. It was built as a mid-engined Roadster in Gm\u00fcnd\/Austria by his son Ferry Porsche in 1948 while he was arrested in France. When he came back home he said: “I wouldn\u2019t change any bolt”. The following production cars however showed a rear-engined layout again as Porsche developed for the Volkswagen before World War 2. He still owned some licenses for the VW and was able to get much needed parts for special prices, like gearboxes, suspensions, steering and brake systems.

The first 50 cars were made by hand in Gm\u00fcnd, afterwards Porsche moved back to Stuttgart Zuffenhausen into the facilities of coachbuilder Reutter. Within the next few years many modifications have been done to the 356, leading to Series A, B and C as well as the Speedster, Roadster, Convertible D, Hardtop Coup\u00e9 and the America Roadster of which only 15 cars have been produced. In 1965 production stopped after 76,302 examples. Next to the sports cars Porsche tried to win an announcement from German Bundeswehr and built an offroad car named 597 ‘Jagdwagen’. They competed against Auto Union (DKW) and Borgward (Goliath) but lost to the DKW Munga. Depending on the sources between 70 and 100 cars have been made of which up to 49 were for the civilian market. It was the very first Porsche with an all-wheel drive system.<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n

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