Ferdinand Porsche Built an Electric Car Before He Built a Sports Car

The Exposition Universelle of 1900 was the sort of event that made reputations. Some forty-eight million visitors passed through the Paris gates between April and November, and among the machinery on display was a carriage sent from Vienna by the coachbuilder Jakob Lohner & Co. It had no engine, no transmission, no driveshaft and no belts. Each of its front wheels carried an electric motor built directly into the hub, and the man responsible for that arrangement was a twenty-four-year-old Bohemian engineer named Ferdinand Porsche.

The sports cars that would eventually carry his surname were still decades away. His first sports car design, the Austro-Daimler Sascha, did not appear until 1922, and the first vehicle to wear the Porsche name would wait until 1948. Before any of that, Porsche was an electrical engineer working out how to move a heavy vehicle without a mechanical driveline. Weissach’s current electric program is usually described as a departure from what the company had always been. The historical record points to something closer to a return.