Porsche purists will tell you the first Porsche was the 356 from 1948. Um, no. Not quite. It’s not the 356/1, the mid-engine precursor to the 356, either. And don’t think you’re being smart mentioning the 1898 Lohner-Porsche Mixte-Hybrid, which was the world’s first gas-electric hybrid. Close, but no. The first car designed by Ferdinand Porsche was the “Egger-Lohner electric vehicle, C.2 Phaeton model,” or P1 for short.
That’s right. It was electric.
The P1 — for “Porsche No. One” — was among the first vehicles registered in Austria when it rolled onto the streets of Vienna on June 26, 1898. Like most “cars” of the era, it was little more than a wagon with a steering wheel and something other than a horse propelling it. Like all proper Porsches, the eng… er, motor was out back, driving the rear wheels. So what if the mill weighed 287 pounds and put down a mere three horsepower. It was 1898, after all.
That said, Ferdinand Porsche, who was just 23 at the time, developed an “overloading” mode that gave the driver another two horsepower. Goose it with the full five horsepower and the 2,977-pound car would reach reach the impressive speed of 22 mph. With a little moderation on the accelerator, the P1 was good for 50 miles, putting it ahead of many gasoline-powered vehicles of the day. And you could say Porsche’s motorsports roots started with the P1, as the car managed to finish a 40-km EV race in 1899. Just how it finished seems to have been lost to history, but Porsche did say half of the 28 entries failed to finish the race.
Just four were built. This one was was discovered in a warehouse in Austria, where it had been sitting unmolested since 1902. It’s all original, and headed to the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, where it will be joined alongside the automaker’s latest and greatest electric car, the utterly insane 918 Spyder. Truth be told, we’re not sure which one we’d want to drive first…
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