by Ross Finlay (05 Dec 01)

I may have got this wrong, but I'm a little uneasy about Porsche's claim, in advance of next year's launch of the Cayenne 4x4, that its experience of four-wheel drive goes right back to Ferdinand Porsche's electrically powered Lohner-Porsche, of which a 1901 model is shown here.

It was certainly a highly ingenious design, with an almost frictionless drive system based on doing away with a conventional transmission and having electric motors in the wheel hubs, fed with current from a heavy array of storage batteries. That isn't as archaic as it sounds, because the far-travelled NASA buggy used an updated version of the same arrangement as it pottered around the surface of the moon. To save weight, though, later versions of the Lohner-Porsche had petrol engines running dynamos to provide the electric power to the hub motors.

Off at a tangent, one of the CARkeys racing types says that there was once a Can-Am car powered by Snowmobile engines, one to each wheel - but look, I'm already in enough trouble here.

What's causing an imaginary red light to flash intermittently somewhere inside my head is the fact that in all the references to the Lohner-Porsches in the English-language edition of Richard von Frankenberg's Porsche - the Man and his Cars, he specifically says they had front-wheel drive. But is that a translation thing? Does it mean that they had front-wheel drive as well as rear-wheel drive, or front-wheel drive alone? (See footnote at bottom of page.)

What the Lohner-Porsches did have, and this is for certain, was the equivalent of four-wheel braking, which was every bit as unusual 101 years ago. They were fitted with mechanical brakes for the back wheels and, as von Frankenburg put it, in translation again, "there were also short-circuit electrical ones for the hub motors in the front wheels."

Now One Thing, Now The Other

Six paragraphs in, and I'm edging towards the opinion that in this context "front-wheel drive" means "four-wheel drive". Certainly, in our heading photograph of a Lohner-Porsche delivered in 1901 to an English customer, E W Hart of Luton, the front and rear wheels and hubs look identical. Hart is at the wheel, and Ferdinand Porsche, who delivered the car personally, is the chap with the bowler hat and wing collar sitting facing the same way as the driver.

Hart entered his Lohner in speed events, and Porsche did the same with various works cars, smashing the electric car record in competitions like the Semmering hillclimb.

(Pause for flipping a coin. Heads it's "four", tails it's "front". Drat.)

No, no. Hold on, hold on. I'm looking at a picture of the Semmering car, and of another, later, Lohner-Porsche with Ferdinand at the wheel as he locks over for a left-hander while setting FTD at the Exelberg hillclimb in 1902. These two cars have different wheels front and rear, and there's no sign of any bulky electrical gear on the rear hubs. But both of them have the same hubs, on the front wheels only, as were fitted to all four wheels of Hart's car.

And there's another picture, of a Lohner-Porsche touring car, smaller than the Luton machine, which has similar hubs, once again, only at the front. Did Hart's car have the same hubs front and rear only to make it look better?

(Ah, how soothing is an ice-pack applied to the throbbing temples!)

Anyway, Porsche certainly knew about multi-wheel drive, which he applied later to tractors and trailer-towing "road trains" for both civilian and military applications.

And, decades afterwards, he returned to four-wheel drive for one of his most spectacular creations, known to his own design office as the Porsche Type 80, designed in 1937. It was intended as a Land Speed Record contender, and it was commissioned by Mercedes-Benz.

Whimper . . . Wasn't Porsche designing Grand Prix and record cars for Auto-Union at that time? I must be calm, calm, dammit.

Relax, Relax

It's OK. That was the year, as Porsche was heavily involved with the Volkswagen project, when he came to an agreement with Mercedes to build an LSR car. This was some machine, with a 2500bhp V12 fighter aircraft engine able to reach more than 500bhp extra in short bursts. It was a six-wheeler, with the wheels on both rear axles driven, and all wheels braked. The streamlining and tail fin design verged on the fantastic, and it had a phenomenally low Cd figure.

But it never did a record run. The war intervened, and the car ended up in the Daimler-Benz Museum in Stuttgart.

After the war, the Porsche firm became embroiled in the design, but not operation, of the Italian-financed Cisitalia Grand Prix project. It ended up with the car, which had selectable four-wheel drive, being entered, very unsuccessfully, as the Argentine government-sponsored Autoar.

If Porsche had been more closely concerned with this brilliant design, the Cisitalia might have got somewhere. It was intended not only to compete in circuit races, but also to go for the world standing-start kilometre record.

After becoming a manufacturer in its own right, the Porsche company worked on various 4WD projects for outside customers, produced an off-roader Type 597 in 1955, and finally came up with its own first four-wheel drive road car based on the 911. That was in 1981, and two years later the 959 with electronically controlled four-wheel drive appeared. Porsche rallied these cars very successfully in the African desert "raids". A 911 won at Dakar in 1984, and a 959 repeated the victory a year later.

The 911 Carrera 4 came along in 1988, and Porsche has had four-wheel drive models in its catalogue ever since, culminating (so far) in the formidable 911 Turbo version, with its Porsche Stability Management and absolutely sensational performance.

With cars like this, and the Cayenne too, there is no doubt whatever about the presence of four-wheel drive technology. Easy on the black coffee, then.

(Footnote: a knowledgeable reader assures us that Mr Hart's car was indeed four-wheel drive.)

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