With a whopping 2kW and an elegant wooden design, historians have unearthed the first ever Porsche. Built by Ferdinand Porsche in 1898, the car, dubbed the ‘P1’, has sat in a shed for more than 100 years and is now on display at the Porsche Museum at Stuttgart.
The electric-powered car is called P1 because Ferdinand engraved that code onto every one of its components. Technically the car’s real name is Egger-Lohner electric vehicle C.2 Phaeton, which is in reference to the rear-mounted electric engine.
In terms of the nitty gritty, the P1 could reach a blistering top speed of 33km/h and had a range of about 80km before it ran out of juice.
Porsche drove the car through the the streets of Vienna, Austria in 1898 before entering it in an electric car race the following year at a Berlin international motor vehicle exhibition.
This is a really cool find and important in terms of its historical significance – it’s just too bad we have to travel all the way to Stuttgart to see it.
