The OTHER Porsche Museums in Europe

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Many of us have been to the Porsche Museum in Zuffenhasen which is very good, if a bit clinical. However, Ferdinand Porsche was designing cars from 1900 on, and by the time Porsche AG was launched in 1948 he was quite ill and died two years later.

He had had a bunch of careers, with Lohner, Austro Daimler, Mercedes, Auto Union, VW, and a few more. It was generally agreed that he was not the easiest person to work with.

However, there are some fascinating places that display his very important work.

Of course, the Porsche Museum has the critical cars from 1948 on:

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Still gives me a shock to see a museum car I actually saw racing at the Nürburgring. Had a chat with Walter Röhril about it at the N24 in 2010.

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You do not have to go far to see the first examples of Porsche designed technology. The Daimler-Benz Museum has an SSK , the engine of which was designed by Ferdinand Porsche when he was Chief Engineer for Mercedes before the merger.

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There are a number of quite interesting museums once you leave Stuttgart and I will show them below:

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The first is the small museum in Gmünd when're the first 356s were built in an old sawmill. The museum itself is not the site of the production facility which no longer exists, but is at least close to where the world unfolded in 1948

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Hans-Peter Porsche (son of Ferry) has a beautiful little museum devoted to old transportation toys which has an amazing model railroad that does 24 hours of sunrise and sunset every half hour. He also has some of his cars on display in the museum.

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I saw a very nice model of the famous 917 that won the Le Mans 24 in 1970. A little later I was talking to Hans-Peter and he mentioned that he was having lunch with Hans Hermann who had actually driven the real car to victory at that race. Hans is of course no longer active. I asked him what he drove these days. He laughed and said :"Mercedes":)

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Hans-Peter's museum is beautifully designed with no restriction on cost:

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There is a wonderful museum near Salzburg called Fahr(T)Raum which was founded by Ernst Piech, the son of Louise Porsche and grandson of Ferdinand Porsche. He has devoted his museum to the many cars designed by Ferdinand Porsche before the current company existed, so is goes back to 1900.

He is a very charming guy and spent a couple of hours with me showing his collection:

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He had a fully operational Lohner-Porsche Hybrid, the first car to bear the Porsche name from 1900:

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The 1909 Austro Daimler Prinz Heinrich was actually driven by Ferdinand Porsche in the Prinz Heinrich race and won. It became the first series production racing car:

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There are numerous examples of Austro-Daimlers, Steyr, Mercedes , all Porsche designs:

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Some of the wartime stuff..the VW Beetle is a very rare car from 1941:

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