by John Glynn | Sep 30, 2015 | Porsche News, Porsche People
While Matthias Müller hits the halfway point of his first week as Volkswagen’s latest Chief Executive, his employers have appointed the new chairman of Porsche AG. Forty-seven year-old Doctor Oliver Blume takes the helm at Stuttgart: a move that has been applauded by many including the Chairman of the Works Council. Will putting the young production chief in charge prove the right way to go?
No doubt Blume is a capable professional, but he has only been at Porsche for two years. Graduating in mechanical engineering from Braunschweig in the early 1990s, Blume headed straight for Audi, where he progressed through the ranks to lead the bodyshell engineering team on the Audi A3 before spending time at the University of Shanghai.
Staying with Audi, Blume led development of a new Audi plant, shifting sideways to SEAT in 2004 and eventually helping to shift production of the Audi A3 to a SEAT plant in Spain, when the Spanish economy collapsed and new car sales plummeted. Success here led to promotion as Global Head of Production for Volkswagen AG in 2009, then onto the Executive Board of Porsche AG as the member responsible for production in 2013.
Porsche Production Cost Cuts?
Wolfgang Porsche renewed Blume’s contract ahead of schedule earlier this year with a five-year extension so, as Müller was always headed for Volkswagen, no doubt this Porsche job has been on the cards for a while. As a Volkswagen man through and through and a keen production cost cutter, Blume may be just what the Supervisory Board wants in charge as global operating costs are pinned to the top of the long-term agenda.
Volkswagen Emissions Scandal: $50 billion
The automotive business unit at Duisburg-Essen University recently estimated that the dieselgate scandal could cost Volkswagen up to $50 billion, so to believe that Porsche will be ringfenced from that would be foolish. As the substantial Chinese market continues to contract, Blume will be expected to deliver increasing sales and enhanced profitability, so what marketing genius will be helping the new boss to achieve this?
New Porsche Sales and Marketing Chief
Fourteen-year Porsche veteran and current head of Sales and Marketing, Bernhard Maier, has just been shot from a cannon towards the Czech Republic to take the reins at Skoda, as the former CEO there has been put in charge of a unifed Volkswagen for Canada, North America and Mexico. This means a new Porsche sales and marketing chief, so Blume will have former Porsche Cars North America boss, Detlev von Platen, to help sell whatever he produces.
Von Platen has seven years with Porsche to his name, so the two biggest jobs on the Porsche board can barely claim double figures in time with the badge between them. Cayenne is already on its way to production in Bratislava (Slovakia) alongside Audi Q7 and VW Touareg and, if Audi A3s can be made down in Spain with minimal impact on sales, where else might Porsches be bolted together? Interesting.
by John Glynn | Sep 19, 2015 | Porsche News
Had a bit of a Porsche blog sabbatical while working on other projects and building my new Porschehaus garage & office. Porsche’s Mission E concept, a new 911 with turbochargers as standard and Magnus smashing his 911 into a parked truck with a journalist on board didn’t get me excited enough to pick up a keyboard, but today’s news regarding Porsche’s parent Volkswagen kickstarted some action.
A year after this story first broke in the UK’s Sunday Times (as reported on ConsultEV), America’s Environmental Protection Agency has ordered the recall of almost half a million Volkswagen group cars sold in the US since 2008, after uncovering cheat software in Volkswagen group diesel cars designed to lower emissions when being run through emissions testing. The defeat device software knocks Nitrogen Dioxide emissions down for testing, but NO2 emissions are up to 40 times higher than levels permitted in the USA at all other times.
Toxic by inhalation, Kings College in London blamed Nitrogen Dioxide for 9,500 deaths in the city during 2010. The Nitrogen Dioxide emissions cheat software has so far been located on just five VW And Audi cars tested by the EPA, but every car found to be running the cheat software will incur a penalty of some $40k for its manufacturer. The maths apparently totals to almost $18 billion for Volkswagen in the US.
The bigger story will come from the fallout in Volkswagen’s other markets, paticularly back home in Germany. Also count on a slew of class action lawsuits against VW in the super-litigious USA. Perhaps the most bemusing aspect to this story is that emissions cheating is absolutely commonplace in vehicle testing. From my own conversations with car manufacturer-employed friends over the years, it seems that most if not all modern manufacturer ECUs are programmed with cheat software, designed to recognise throttle patterns common to rolling road emissions testing and shut down as much combustion as possible while the tests are being carried out.
A recent European Union report says that real-world emissions from cars can be up to 40% higher than seen in emissions approval testing, so this Volkswagen story is just the tip of the iceberg. You’d think the EPA would have known about this all along. I smell a rat in a Tesla lab coat, or maybe an EPA bod who stopped getting hush money. Either way, you know the discovery is no real shock to the emissions testing system: it’s a PR campaign designed to shock consumers and batter VW.
How does this affect Porsche? Well, imagine if your dad was fined $18 billion and 50,000 Americans started suing him. You would bloody know about it.
by John Glynn | Jul 4, 2015 | Classic Porsche Blog, Porsche News
Good friend Justin just sent me this interesting slide from Australia, showing the first RHD Porsche 911 Targa being produced. Here’s the story behind it:
“I found a whole lot of my late father’s slides that I had digitally scanned a few years ago. This one is the first RHD targa going down the production line in September 1972.
“As my father told it, we were on the factory tour and the tour guide was talking about Targas. Knowing there were some English and Australians on the tour, it was mentioned that there were no RHD 911 Targas until the following year (i.e. 1973).
“You were still able to take your camera back then and Dad saw a Targa shell being rolled towards us that looked somehow different: initially, he wasn’t sure how. He took a shot of it quickly and then walked past it. On the build sheet of the car, he saw erste rechts (1st right), so we can assume it was the first production RHD Targa for the 73MY. It was mid-September 1972 my parents tell me.
“The tour guide realised and, rather than seizing Dad’s camera, asked him not to do anything with the picture until after the official embargo (which was early 1973). I assume the car was being shown somewhere – Earl’s Court , Birmingham, South Africa, Hong Kong? Dad complied with Porsche’s request, which was perfectly reasonable. I wonder where the car is now – or if indeed it still survives?
“As a side note, there are 2 73S Targas (both RHD, and both English) awaiting restorations in Sydney (where my green L was done) – one Sepia, and the other Signal Yellow. They’ll be done in about two years.”
Love getting presents from overseas and this was a really good one! Thanks, Justin 😉
by John Glynn | May 9, 2015 | Art and Books, Classic Porsche Blog
A Porsche 928 art car painted by eminent German artist, Heinz Mack, will be auctioned at the Lempertz Contemporary Art sale in Cologne on May 30, 2015. Though classic Porsche 928 values are rising along with prices for all other older Porsche models, the likely value of this car is more closely linked to its artistic connections.
Heinz Mack and ZERO
Born in Lollar near Frankfurt in 1931, Heinz Mack attended the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts during the 1950s, also attaining a philosophy degree at the University of Cologne. In 1957, Mack started an art magazine ‘ZERO’, which ran for a decade and gave rise to the eponymous ZERO art movement.
ZERO held to the notion that art should be void of colour, emotion and individual expression. Founded by a trio of German artists including Mack, Otto Piene and Günther Uecker, ZERO later encompassed a wider group of primarily European artists including the Swiss Jean Tinguely and Argentinian-born Italian, Lucio Fontana.
The central theme of Heinz Mack’s art is light. His ideas have been expressed through sculptures and pictures in a hugely diverse range of materials and locations. Often working in open spaces ‘untouched by the fingerprint of civilisation’, Mack’s most recent project, Nine Columns under Sky, was created on the beautiful Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in my favourite city of Venice. Nine seven-metre columns covered in more than 800,000 gold-plated mosaic tiles inspired by the Sahara Desert invite reflection upon this long-term epicentre of Mediterranean art.
Porsche 928 Art Car & Value
While Mack is reputedly a passionate collector of cars, his tastes lean more toward British machinery. Preferring Aston Martins and Jaguars, Mack was asked to paint the Porsche 928S by a friend in 1984.
The Porsche is a 1978 4.4-litre 928S manual with TUV approval to August 2015. The odometer reading shows unknown kilometres but the car is said to display signs of its age. Signed by the artist on both doors and taking some inspiration from period aero tests, the design is said to “accentuate the aerodynamic silhouette of the sports car with small triangles on both sides and a colour spectrum that morphs from white into black”.
Porsche Museum 928 provenance
Previously exhibited at the Porsche Museum, auction estimates for the car run from €40-€45k. Given current prices for standard Porsche 928s of similar vintage, this seems ridiculously low for a bona-fide art car.
The most recent large scale auction of ZERO artist output came at Sotheby’s in 2010, where a catalogue of of 49 paintings and drawings sold for more than four times the original auction estimates, to hit a total of more than £54 million.
Mindful of where the art market has soared to in the five years since, current interest in the unique early 928 and the parallels between classic Porsche and modern art collecting, I can see this car outperforming all expectations at auction. I am excited to see how it goes.
by John Glynn | Apr 27, 2015 | Porsche News, New Models
Interesting story on Gizmag this morning about how Porsche has patented a new type of variable compression ration engine technology. Partnering Porsche in this venture is Hilite International, already a long-standing client at Porsche Consulting.
Variable Compression Ratio (VCR) is a prime candidate for the next big step in internal combustion engine efficiency. It is particularly suitable for turbocharged engines, and we know that all 911s will adopt turbocharged engines over the next few years, alongside the many turbocharged model variants in the Macan, Cayenne and Panamera ranges already produced by Porsche.
Compression ratio is critical to performance, and is of particular importance on turbocharged engines. Turbos work by compressing the intake charge of air and fuel before ramming it into the combustion chamber under pressure. Because a turbocharger is powered by exhaust gas, and therefore is not always running at peak boost, the amount of fuel/air mix entering the cylinder varies from low volume when the turbo is not spinning to maximum volume when the turbo is running at peak revs. Turbocharged engines must therefore run lower compression ratios, to allow that higher volume at peak boost. This costs them power.
Why use Variable Compression Ratio technology?
One way to increase the efficiency of a turbocharged engine would be to constantly adjust the compression ratio, giving higher compression off-boost, and reducing the compression as boost pressure rises, to prevent detonation. The Porsche system (top) is clever, planting the piston on an eccentric mount that is automatically adjusted by control rods, which swivel the piston up or down on the crankshaft connecting rod depending on oil pressure, thus controlling the compression ratio.
Compare this solution to the nicely engineered but complex solution developed by MCE over the last decade (above photo shared under ‘fair use’), and it is perhaps easy to imagine how this new patent might better suit volume manufacturing, delivering less risk to reliability. It is also highly licensable technology: something which Porsche has done very well from over its history. So, even if the technology never makes it into a Porsche, it could be shared commercially with a wide range of other end users.
Bravo Porsche engineering! We look forward to seeing a fully developed version of this system come to production, and to experiencing the benefits on the road.
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