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.
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.
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.
This image gives a good portrayal of the capability and performance of the M-B 500E, a joint creation of Daimler-Benz and Porsche to kick off the Nineties.
A new project was needed. Porsche’s manufacturing facilities both old and new were underutilized. This led to an aggressive effort to sell not only engineering capacity but also production capacity to other car makers. Negotiations that began in 1988 led to the signing of a contract on March 19, 1990 to produce a special model. It would be implemented for none other than Porsche’s Stuttgart neighbor, Daimler-Benz. It would exploit the Reutter building, the one formerly used by the Reutter coachworks that had housed the Porsche team in its return to Stuttgart in the early 1950s.
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