Austro-Daimler and the Making of Ferdinand Porsche

When Ferdinand Porsche left Ludwig Lohner’s world in 1906, he did not leave behind the engineering instinct that had defined his earliest work. The electric wheel-hub motors, the Lohner-Porsche, the Semper Vivus, and the Mixte had already revealed something fundamental about him. Porsche did not think of the automobile as a fixed object. He saw it as a problem to be solved — power, weight, traction, packaging, reliability, efficiency, and speed, all competing against one another in the same machine.

At Lohner, that problem had been electric. At Austro-Daimler, it became something larger, louder, faster, and more industrial.