The Most Enduring Form in Car Design

Cover the badge on a Porsche 911 and you can likely still name it. Almost no other car has kept its shape for so long. This is the story of where that shape came from, and what it cost. It runs across three generations of one family, all named Ferdinand. The first built the engine of the modern car, then bent it to the worst purpose of the century. The second built the first car to wear the family name, in a former sawmill, while his father sat in a French prison. The third drew the shape the whole world recognizes, after possibly the most important design school in Europe threw him out. From an electric carriage built in 1898 to a people's car built for a dictator, through forced labor, a design-school rejection, a car built to kill the 911, a hostile takeover that ran backward, and the largest stock-market listing in European history, this is the design history of Porsche: a company whose entire identity rests on one idea, that a form, once right, should be left alone.