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The legends of how car producers began are always exciting and Porsche is no different. Porsche was begun by a key man for Germany’s unified armed forces named Ferdinand Porsche. He became a critical person for producing cars, airplanes and tanks. As being an auto engineer, he developed for a thousand patents and for the period of the 1920′s was the chief engineer at Mercedez-Benz. Soon after Porsche left Mercedez-Benz, he established an engineering workshop and also constructed the Volkswagen. He had been the operations chief at the factory in Wolfburg that was manufacturing Volkswagens and was kept there by Allies at the end of World War II.

A couple of years after he was discharged, Ferdinand Porsche and his son, Ferry, started creating the Porsche 356. The sports car had a rear-mounted, four-cylinder boxer engine that was very similar to the Volkswagen. The top speed of the Porsche 356 was only 87 mph. Though it was not a speed demon, the car had a very elegant and innovative design as a convertible and, later, as a hard top. The Porsche 356 was put together at a workshop that was owned by a master of streamlined auto production named Erwin Komenda. Komenda worked well along side with Porsche at Volkswagen and was a crucial person for design methods and sheet metal.

Komenda was important in developing a new style of closed coupe, referred to as the fastback, which is still prominent in today’s luxury sports cars. In conjunction with Porsche’s grandson, Komenda moved forward using fastback design by creating the Porsche 911. The 911 became a spectacular sports car having frog eye headlights, straight waistline, a sloping bonnet and curves running from the windscreen to the rear bumper. As the style was much like the first Porsche, technically, it had been more like the BMW 1500. While the design was a bit controversial, the 911 became the symbol of what Porsche was all about.

Porsche the business nearly fell apart throughout the 70′s and 80′s when designers at that time tried to move too far off from Porsche’s classic designs. Samples of their bad attempt to escape from the past were the 928 and 924 which were co-developed with Volkswagen. However in the 1990′s, the company recognized that the classic designs were timeless and that resulted in a revival to profitability. The long standing 911 continued to push forward as almost forty people in the company worked on advancing its technology. An example is the impressive race car/sport car hybrid, 911 GTI which was put together by in-house designer, Anthony R Hatter.

The new Boxter open up a new model line for Porsche in 1999. As typical of numerous car companies, Porsche was able to weather a few heavy storms to the point of close to collapse, only to return more robust than ever. They were able to succeed at a transitional time in the auto industry where major car companies were losing money and going bankrupt. Discover more porsche rims.