The benefit of wider tires of this M-B 500E are visible as it’s pressed hard through a bend. The Porsche touch ensured a near-50/50 front/rear weight distribution.
The benefit of wider tires of this M-B 500E are visible as it’s pressed hard through a bend. The Porsche touch ensured a near-50/50 front/rear weight distribution.
Car Profiles

Porsche Makes a Mercedes: The 500E Story

Bridging an awkward era for Porsche, the Zuffenhausen company part-engineered and part-produced one of the niftiest cars of the Nineties—the Mercedes-Benz 500E. The 10,000 made in five years are delivering pleasure to knowledgeable motorists.

Avatar photoKarl Ludvigsen

Editor’s Note: This story was reproduced with permission from our companion website Stuttcars.com.

A New Opportunity for Porsche

For Porsche’s Michael Hölscher this was his first major project. It was his opportunity to set up fabrication and assembly of a complete automobile at a time when Porsche was suffering from the major fall in the value of the dollar that had supported it for so long. This was 1989, when new engineering chief Ulrich Benz was finding his feet and Company chief Heinz Branitzki was on the verge of dismissal. They had an unexploited resource in their Werk 2, the Reutter building at the heart of the company’s complex in Zuffenhausen, which was just finishing its run of Porsche’s Type 959 supercars.

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Karl Ludvigsen
Karl E. Ludvigsen is a journalist, author, and historian of the automotive industry and motorsports. Karl Ludvigsen is the author of the definitive history of Porsche. His Porsche history, Excellence was Expected, is considered to be a model of the researching and writing of the history of an auto company. Ludvigsen is an honorary member of the Vintage Sports Car Club of America and the Corvair Society of America. He is also a member of the council of the Historic Automobile Group.
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