The First Car to Bear the Porsche Name | Hacker News Reader

The First Car to Bear the Porsche Name

wsj.com

19 pointsjkuria11 comments

“Fuel Economy: 20 mpg, mixed driving (est.)” Crazy to think of how little progress we’ve made on that end, assuming the reporting is accurate.

It is incredibly slow and small even by today's compact car standards. We have made a huge amount of progress.

Sure, but that car took 20 seconds to get to 60 and only weighs 1300lbs. It probably offers little more safety than a motorcycle. Neat piece of history though

Have we? Modern diesels easily get 60-70mpg(49-58 US mpg) without even trying, and modern petrols are not much worse - I recently drove a small VW Polo with a 1.2L I4 90bhp petrol engine, fully loaded with luggage, and averaged 54mpg(45 US mpg) over 600 miles. Even my own Mercedes-AMG with 381bhp can easily average 32-35mpg(26-29 US mpg) when driven on longer trips.

The diesel comparison is perhaps not entirely fair. The density of diesel is about 833 kg/m3 compared to 740 kg/m3 for gasoline. This gives diesel about 13% higher energy density per volume.

Sure, that's why I gave two petrol examples as well.

It weighs about 600kg and has a 1 liter engine that makes about 50bhp. You can run a car of that size and weight on solar power in 2019.

Was it stolen Tatra, or Nazi military vehicle?

I tried finding out about Ferdinand Porsche some more and I doubt he needed to steal a design for a car, seeing as he has had a highly successful career as an automobile engineer after the war, even winning the 'Car Engineer of the Century' (according to Wikipedia). That is not saying that he didn't steal anything, but I am saying that he had a certain ability. Also, the line between inspiration and stealing in creative pursuits is quite thin.

The 'Nazi' part of your remark does make sense as a valid critique. Then again, many innovations have come out of war and he did go to prison. Although on Wikipedia we can read:

> The innovative 4WD design never raced, but the money it received was used to redeem Ferdinand Porsche from prison.

It feels odd that you can redeem yourself out of prison for taking part in some of humanity's worst crimes. Then again, there are recent examples of horrific crimes against humanity that go unpunished in order to make profits as well, so it is the norm apparently.

I don't know, of course, but the Typ12 was created (just) before the Tatra V570 (second prototype, the first looked very different):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_Type_12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatra_V570

and it seems like both Porsche and Ledwinka worked at Steyr so it is very possible that some earlier Ledwinka project at Steyr "inspired" Porsche, and possibly also viceversa, in any case they had very similar education and experience in overlapping years.

I find more probable that this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Ledwinka#Volkswagen_contr...

> In any case, of Ledwinka, Porsche admitted "Well, sometimes I looked over his shoulder and sometimes he looked over mine"

is actually accurate.

yes, its based on stolen Tatra V570, legally settled in 1965

"Porsche 64, also known as the Type 64 and Type 60K10 ... "60K10" means body design 10 for the Type-60 Beetle."

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