The motor car has owned the twentieth century. It has driven economies, employed millions, mobilised armies and enthralled us with the idea that speed equals progress. Porsche occupies a unique place in that history. Its story has everything: the thrills and spills of motor racing, the glamour and intrigue of politics, the shifting fortunes of big business ---- all entwined and interwoven through a family saga of three generations and projected against the backdrop of European history.

Take for instance, the extraordinary career of Ferdinand Porsche, a brilliant engineer, progenitor of the illustrious marque and recently elected "The Most Significant Automotive Engineer of the Century". Born in Maffersdorf, in what is now the Czech Republic, his initial coup was in 1898, when he designed an electric hub mounted motor, first fitted to cars when he joined Lohner Carriages in 1900.

Seventy-two years later, the Apollo missions lunar buggy employed precisely the same Porsche patented propulsion system. Called up for military service in 1902, Porsche served as chauffeur to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose murder in Sarajevo ignited the first World War. The war was kinder to Porsche, who shelved his designs for racing cars, and came up with innovative military vehicles instead. In fact, wars were always good for Porsche: during the second world war, his German tank and jeep designs proved so popular with troops on both sides that advancing Allied soldiers would commandeer them when they could. There were pitfalls too. The outbreak of war in 1939 did delay the mass production of Porsches' original design for the Volkswagen Beetle, despite the fact that almost 300,000 Germans had already paid 1,000 Reichs marks up-front. There was one very satisfied customer: The prototype was a 50th birthday gift to Germany's Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.

Porsche's designs made a significant contribution to the Nazi war effort, but his name was cleared at the Nuremberg trials. However, the French indicted him on a murder charge. They showed an expedient approach to the process of de-Nazification by extracting a ransom of 1 million French francs for his release in 1947 and obliged him, in the mean time, to advise on the design of Renault's equivalent of the VW Beetle.

The Volkswagen finally went into production in 1949. Ferdinand Porsche died two years later, but over the next forty years some 20 million Beetles were made and sold. Thanks to a deal cut with VW by Ferdinand's son Ferry, Porsche received a royalty on every Beetle made. That financial security enabled Ferry to realise his father's dream of developing a compact light weight sports car --- the Type 356. Its smooth aerodynamic contours owed much to Erwin Komenda's experience of using wind tunnel testing for the first time to hone the shapes of Porsche designs.

The 356 shared its basic layout and many components with the Beetle, and like Porsche's modern classic, the Type 911 --- which was the brain child of Ferry's son, Butzi --- the 356's engine too was mounted at the rear, hung behind the back axle. The 356 won its class title in its debut race at Le Mans 24 hours, in 1951. It was Porsche's first major international racing victory, and the marque soon came to rely on motor sport as a way of developing and promoting new cars.

"It was Ferdinand Piech, another grandson of Porsche, who derived the type 917 --- Porsche's most successful racing car of all time, which won seven times out of eight world championship races in 1970, including Le Mans. But the buttress of the brand since the 60's has been Butzi's 911. Conceived as a luxury grand tourer, the 911 rapidly evolved into the high performance super car we know today. Ironically, the 911 was due to be phased out in the late 1970s in favour of more sober coupes like the 928, but the yuppie boom of the 1980s gave it a fresh new lease of life.
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Though Porsche ceased to be a family firm when Piech left the company in 1972, Ferdinand's dynasty actually has come a full circle. His grandson is now Chairman of the Volkswagen group including Audi, Skoda, NSU, and Auto Union --- all companies for which the old man designed. One of the ironies of Ferdinand's career was that his first engineering triumph, that electric hub motor, was commissioned because Lohner's aristocratic customers regarded the internal combustion engine as too dirty and noisy.

If Piech were to pioneer the zero emissions car in the next century, then the symmetry would be complete.