I came back in from walking Ted the Jack Russell tonight and plonked myself down in front of the TV for an hour of Youtube education just as Porsche uploaded a pretty cool video following the Taycan down the production line. The feature is just how I like these things: no narration, just a nicely edited visual documentary that allows the unfolding story to breathe and invites the viewer to fill in the blanks. Scroll down to watch it.
How It’s Made: Old Guy TV
Judging by the success of channels such as MyMechanics (943k subscribers) and Rescue and Restore (725k subs), more than a few of us like this silent movie treatment with plenty of silent space to watch stuff being made and repaired. If you’re one of those people, then this Taycan video will be right up your street. It’s 29 minutes long and there is no audio soundtrack of any description. Just sit back, press play and enjoy.
A few thoughts came to mind while watching this film on what passes for a big screen around here.
Firstly, the volume is on, but the silence is golden. The robots are silent, there are not too many people around, the lack of ear defenders show this is a silent environment. The loudest nose is when the finished Taycan hits the dyno rollers for its first indoor road test and the tyres begin to roll. That silent film aspect is striking.
Secondly, this is clearly a brand new plant designed for the future. The lighting is impeccable, the surfaces are unmarked and the workers present themselves in robot-like perfection. One is struck by the inference that this car factory is a first: “it is like no car factory you have ever seen before, because what we’re building is 100% clean.” Yet it is built on the site of the first Porsche production line from seven decades ago. Progress in action.
The mix of workers is a little surprising: mostly young white males, all seemingly straight from the barber shop in the corner. I guess many of those shown are new to Porsche, so they have never built a petrol-engined car before and they perhaps never will. Will they ever even own a car? Living in a city with great transport links, I’m not sure I would bother.
The apparent lack of old hands amongst the workforce, implies that there is no “this is how we do it in the other workshop”. On the one hand, I like the feel of that freshness but, on the other, the joy of working with older mechanics was a big attraction when I started my apprenticeship in the mid-1980s. If the decision to keep the new car/new workforce separate was a deliberate one, that is interesting.
Finally, the big message is: LOOK AT THE CONTRAST. Gone are the grizzled welders in a darkened warehouse, gone the rows of German metalworkers beating the bodywork with hammer and dolly, gone are the painters, sent mad by solvent abuse, gone their crazy comrades, gluing vinyl and leather to the roof and side panels with industrial strength adhesive. Gone is the music of engines being fired up for the first time, gone are the fumes from the flat-six boxers, starting as they mean to go on. On the one hand, I like it. On the other, I still quite like it.
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DriveNation’s Andrew Frankel has just shared his impressions following an early open-road press drive in the pre-production Porsche Taycan. You can read his full review here, or scroll to the end. Here are some comments worth thinking about:
“You sit low: 911 low, which is odd in a four-door car weighing around 2.25 tonnes. Yes, it’s near silent but what you notice first is the ride quality. It is ridiculously good, the best of any Porsche I have driven.
“The acceleration is violent, even in the Turbo. The steering was a surprise: weighty, accurate, linear, way closer to a 911 than a Panamera. It is the best electric car I’ve driven and by a mile.”
Porsche gears up for Taycan
Taycan is part of Porsche’s €6 billion gamble on a 50% sales split between electrified and pure ICE vehicles by 2025. Taycan production has carbon neutral ambitions: the goal is a factory with no environmental impact.
Stuttgart’s first full electric production car will add 1,200 employees to the factory-within-a-factory in Zuffenhausen. “The Taycan is one of biggest creators of jobs in the history of Porsche,” said Andreas Haffner, head of HR and Social Affairs. Not all of these new employees will be producing the Taycan; they will also build two-door sports cars. Porsche wants a team blending experienced sports car builders and new staff.
In a programme carried out at last year’s Geneva Motor Show, Porsche apparently measured more than 20,000 people worldwide who were interested in buying a Taycan. Buyers were invited to place a deposit before adding their names to an options programme list. Porsche upgraded its production plans off the back of that information.
The drip feeding of performance data and feedback echoing Frankel’s opinions from first press drives ahead of next month’s launch will no doubt be getting some wallets flapping. Pre-production cars have already been shown at Shanghai, Goodwood Festival of Speed and Formula E season finale in New York to build interest amongst the target demographic.
Taycan covers 2,000 miles in 24 hours
Endurance testing at Porsche’s Nardo facility recently allowed a pre-production Taycan to cover 3,425 kilometres (2128 miles) in 24 hours, stopping only for quick charging and driver changes. Speed tests at Nardo have shown the Taycan to be capable of going from 0-200 km/h (124 mph) 26 times in a row, taking an average of under 10 seconds each time.
The latest testing at the Nürburgring set a new lap record for a four-door electric car of 7 minutes 42 seconds around the 20.6 kilometre Nordschleife lap record circuit. That’s a minute slower than a Porsche 911 GT2 RS, but Taycan used no petrol to do that lap time and the only noises heard came from the tyres and the guy with the stopwatch at the finish line.
Despite owning a Prius for several years and fully appreciating what Porsche is working towards, I’m not an electric car evangelist. I would rather cut my miles and try to drive smarter than pour money into something that is marketed as a zero emissions car but in fact takes substantial energy to produce and needs charging via the national grid every day of its life. There is still financial sense in running efficient petrol engines.
My main thought when I read about the efforts going in to electric cars is that every minute spent developing one thing is a minute that is not spent developing another, which may still have much to contribute. But such is life. Taycan production slots will be released towards the end of 2019, so expect a deluge of press once the kids go back to school. You lucky people!
Ferdinand Piëch (above right with his grandfather, Ferdinand Porsche) has died at the age of 82. Justly famous for many successes across a glittering automotive career, Piëch was a polarising character. I can’t think of one other person – certainly not in the world of engineering – who provokes such extremes of delight and derision.
The French writer, André Gide (1869-1951) wrote: “It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.” Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, Gide lived this idea to its absolute maximum and Piëch was also in tune.
Born in Vienna in 1937 to Louise (Porsche) and Anton Piëch, Ferdinand graduated from the ETH Zurich in 1962 with a degree in mechanical engineering. His thesis was on the subject of developing a Formula 1 engine. That same year, Porsche built an F1 engine (designed by Hans Mezger) and put it in the 804, the body of which was designed by Piëch’s cousin, Butzi Porsche. The car won the 1962 French Grand Prix.
After joining Porsche in 1963 – the year Butzi was feted as the designer of the Porsche 911 – Piëch was appointed Head of R&D in 1968 and became Porsche’s Technical Director in 1971. This did not sit well in some quarters. A year later, the infighting at Porsche became so overwhelming that Ferry passed a boardroom resolution stating no family member should be involved with day-to-day Porsche operations. The second generation was exiled.
Though Piëch is best known for post-Porsche achievements at Audi and Volkswagen, his first freelance engineering assignment kept him in Stuttgart. Mercedes-Benz chief, Joachim Zahn, brought Piëch in to work on the 3-litre five-cylinder OM-600 diesel engine that debuted in the 1975 W115 240D. The oil burner earned a reputation as one of the greatest engines ever developed. Stock OM 5-cylinders have covered over 1 million kilometres without major repair and tuned OMs can make more than 1,000 horsepower.
After Mercedes, Piëch took the pivotal decision to join Audi as a special projects engineer in 1972. My best friend at school was the son of a Volkswagen/Audi dealer and I vividly remember early-seventies Audis being notably run-of-the-mill. Piëch would change all that.
Turning his gift for technical innovation up to eleven, Piëch personified what was later trademarked as Audi’s brand motto: “Vorsprung durch Technik” (advancement through technology). He led development of the first-ever five-cylinder petrol engine, before adding a turbocharger and building the perfect platform for it: the all-conquering Audi Quattro.
Few products can match the Quattro’s effect on the meaning of cars: the ones that come close usually had Piëch’s involvement (hello Veyron). Launched in 1977, the Quattro was the equivalent of a punk rock band hijacking a bus full of car engineers. For rally fans like me, the greatest motorsport moments of the late 1970s and early 1980s are photos like this:
Piëch’s hits kept coming, with the first turbodiesel engine. TDI became the power of choice for decades. He repeated the Quattro effect by building the perfect home for the TDI engine: the C3 Audi 100. Keeping the car’s innovative aerodynamics a secret by developing the styling away from Audi HQ, Piëch’s slippery 100 set new benchmarks, including a drag coefficient of just 0.30. Completely out of character for a three-box saloon, everything about the car – from the door handles, to the seats, to the feel of the switches – turned Audi’s brand image on its head. I had a much-loved 100 Avant and the 200 Turbo Avant of that era remains one of the most exciting cars I have driven. The later Audi 80 TDI was also fantastic to drive.
In 1993, Piëch joined Volkswagen. The carmaker had just posted the greatest loss in its history, but Piëch had a plan. He introduced single platforms to underpin models across individual brands that could be restyled or redeveloped to suit individual brand characters. The concept brought incredible economies of scale: two-thirds of the parts in each platform-based model were shared across brands. This revolutionised profit margins. During his nine years as CEO (before a further fifteen years as VW Chairman), Volkswagen went from losses of €1 billion to profits of €2.6 billion and became an automotive empire of twelve brands including Scania, Bentley and, most controversially, Porsche.
“Of course I am proud of my grandfather (Ferdinand Porsche),” said Piëch in his autobiography. “But I never felt it my mission to uphold his greatness, nor could I do anything about media suggestions that I suffered from an inferiority complex.”
An inferiority complex would have been fairly low maintenance compared to what actually happened. Piëch’s engineering prowess was matched by an appetite for political intrigue and dramatic events. “It is not possible to take a company to the top by focusing on the highest level of harmony,” is how he put it.
Father to thirteen children by four different women, including Marlene Porsche (his cousin Gerard’s wife of the time), if Ferdinand wanted something to happen, it got done, regardless of consequences. “First and foremost, I always saw myself as a product person, and relied on gut instinct for market demand. Business and politics never distracted me from the core of our mission: to develop and make attractive cars.”
Porsche and VW Tributes
Even those Piëch battled appreciate his achievements. “A gifted car and engine developer whose attention to detail is limitless,” said former Porsche CEO, Wendelin Weideking. “Nothing left the production line that Piëch had not personally closely inspected. However, Piëch was not consistent: it was always a high risk gamble to guess if you had his support.”
“There is not enough time here to sufficiently pay homage to him,” said Hans Dieter Pötsch, Piech’s successor as VW chairman. “The short version is personally I think Ferdinand Piëch set unforgettable milestones in automotive industry and he played a material role in the existence of the Volkswagen Group in its current state.”
“The life’s work of my brother goes above and beyond the companies he worked for,” said Dr. Hans Michel Piëch, Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Porsche SE. “He shaped the German car industry more than any other. And he was closely related to the employees of the Volkswagen Group, in both good times and in bad. Our thoughts are with his wife Ursula and his children. We mourn with them as we mourn with the employees of the Volkswagen Group and all car-enthusiasts, whose lives Ferdinand K. Piëch enriched with his passion.”
RIP Ferdinand Piëch
This morning’s papers all carry obituaries for Ferdinand Piëch and the usual perspectives are present: genius engineer, egomaniacal oligarch, destructive drama queen and the rest. I never met the man, so can only go by what I know: his products. From the air-cooled racing spaceship: the Porsche 917, to the five-cylinder Audi engines, Quattro, the Audi 100 and the Volkswagen XL-1, which was inspired by his 1-Litre-Auto, the products of Ferdinand Piëch are an eternal delight. I will continue to enjoy them and the connection they afford to one of the great minds in automotive history.
Ferdinand Piëch’s talent for technical innovation was fuelled directly by his grandfather’s legacy. The ideas that flowed into production as a result brought twentieth century automotive engineering to an entirely new level. The passing of Ferdinand Piëch is literally the end of an era: our collective futures will miss his unique contribution.
I first experienced Concorde, the world’s only supersonic passenger plane, while it was training in Ireland. While lunch was in the oven on a Sunday morning, my dad used to take us kids out for a drive. We would usually head for the end of the runway at Shannon Airport, watching Concorde pilots training over the Atlantic west coast and waiting for the 747 EI-104 to come in from New York.
We owned several music shops at the time and also sold TVs, hi-fi and radios. An air-band radio was always in the car, and several friends’ fathers worked at Ballygreen: a big air traffic control centre for the north west of Europe. Hearing familiar voices talking to Concorde pilots as the aircraft flew take off and landing circuits for hours was always entertaining.
In 1978, we flew to Jersey on a family holiday, which involved a flight from Shannon to Heathrow on a BAC-111, then on to Jersey on a Vickers Viscount. The high point of the Viscount flight was when the pilot invited us all to look out the window and watch Concorde take off: the first time I had seen the plane use its afterburners in anger. My dad bought me a copy of the now very collectable Concorde book by F. G. Clarke at the Heathrow shop on the way home: it’s still in the loft at my parents’ house.
In 1989, I left a mechanical apprenticeship in Ireland and returned to London, where I had spent three months working in 1986. I started playing music with bandmates already here and got a job working with a gang of West African car cleaners: they were fun times. My sister and I were drawn back to the airport on weekends, often getting a pizza and parking on the top floor of MSCP 2 in the centre of Heathrow, just to watch planes taking off and landing. I decided that working at the airport might be interesting and came back to the Heathrow job centre on a day off to see what was about. I found a job working with British Airways at Terminal 4 as a valet parker for Concorde passengers.
The job was predictable, with a lot of activity around Concorde’s flight times and quiet periods otherwise. I got to know many interesting customers, who often had time to chat about flying on Concorde. I started clocking up some overtime in the car parks at T4 and was offered a job as a Duty Manager there, running the short and long term car parks for a company owned by an energetic north Londoner. He eventually sold his company to National Car Parks and I was part of the furniture. They gave me an opportunity to move across Heathrow to the long term car parks on the eastern side, by the Concorde maintenance hangars.
Concorde was maintained to a rigorous schedule and the aircraft was frequently moved across the road from the apron to the hangars, so we saw it a lot. The engines were run up into huge concrete diverters, which directed the air upwards over our offices: that was always interesting in the wee small hours of the morning. Eventually I moved again, this time to the central area long terms, alongside runway 27R. My office looked out on the runway, so again Concorde was a big part of life, setting off just about every alarm in our parks when it took off at 10:30AM.
I stayed in long term for a bit and then NCP tendered for the short term car parks in the centre. I ended up running this contract for several years as General Manager and became the first GM to make one million pounds profit for my employers. We built a great team of people, debuted groundbreaking technology and handled some huge operational challenges, but the constant was Concorde: a mad blast of noise at 10:30 every morning for the eight years I spent working at Heathrow.
Having several thousand car parking spaces at my disposal led to buying a lot of cars while I worked at the airport, and it was an easy place to sell cars from also. Heathrow has a huge working population that likes to buy and sell all sorts of items in its spare time, so I built up my trade contacts over three or four years before leaving the airport in 1997 and running my own thing for a while. Sliding into motor trade purchasing in 1998 led down many other trade avenues, eventually exposing me to a rich education in trade valuations: something I am still involved with almost twenty years later.
Concorde stopped flying several years after I left Heathrow, but it remains a big part of my youth. The entire experience of air travel has lost its mystique since the late 1970s and the access to viewing nowadays is a real issue for aviation enthusiasts, but I remember my days around this great aircraft fondly. It was nice to see Porsche sending photographer Justin Leighton down to Concorde with the 917-001, creating some interesting juxtapositions between these two iconic mechanical achievements.
I visited well-known Porsche collector, Frank Cassidy, last week and enjoyed a guided tour of his new Boxengasse development. Set in a beautifully landscaped 100-acre property in the heart of rural Oxfordshire, the Porsche-only business park is a bit of a game changer.
Independent Porsche specialist Autofarm is about to move in as Frank’s first tenant. Their new buildings combine old-school brickwork, smooth polished concrete and modern LED lighting and insulation and offer more than enough space to lay out a free-flowing Porsche workshop. The transformational workspace is one of the main drivers behind the relocation and is something that the company’s current premises on the other side of the M40 cannot facilitate.
Hats off to Autofarm bosses, Mikey Wastie and Steve Wood, for embracing the challenge to relocate the comfort and charm of their loft-like current reception space, which I really love, and take such a familiar customer experience to the next level in an all-new environment. I’m excited to see how Autofarm develops in the new location.
Oilcooled Porsche Festival
Helping that settling-in process along is an Autofarm/Boxengasse open day sometime in spring, followed several weeks later by ‘Oilcooled’: a two-day festival over a mid-August weekend aimed at air-cooled enthusiasts.
Oilcooled begins with a Saturday track day at Silverstone, then a cruise back to Boxengasse near Bicester, where an open-air cinema will show a Porsche-themed cult classic that is rarely seen on the big screen. Oxford Fine Dining is supplying the catering and Onassis Events is bringing in cars and enthusiasts in from all over Europe for a big open day on the Sunday.
These two days of Porsche-centric activities have been split up into separate components, so one can drop in and out as preferred. I can envisage arriving for the Saturday evening cinema in some sort of Porsche convoy, enjoying a warm August evening in a beautiful landscaped estate, surrounded by friends old and new in what will hopefully become a regular fixture on the air-cooled calendar that doesn’t require a round trip of several hundred miles to attend. Tickets are now on sale on the Boxengasse website.
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