HN Explorer

28 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 71.3 ms ] thread
cl8ton
Nice find... F Porsche was certainly ahead of the curve even before the VW.

I saw this earlier today on the Porsche forums and it created quite a buzz. This car is worth magnitudes more than an original 356.

bch
As a child, he wired his house for electricity. He was ahead of the curve before he himself was producing cars, no matter the badge.
sdegutis
That sounds incredibly dangerous.
fragsworth
Maybe a bit of recklessness is a good thing once in a while.
cl8ton
You ever buy a Porsche(s) when you first heard they were going to water cooled?
elwell
Not really HN material.
cl8ton
Why not? Ferdinand was a visionary that followed his intuition against all odds and produced an iconic product.
lostlogin
Visionary, yes. There are some pretty serious question marks over his character however. http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-652371.html#spRe...
lispm
I don't think these are just 'question marks'. It's pretty clear that Ferdinand Porsche was a Nazi and he supported the German war machine in a big way.
MartinCron
"Morally suspect" also fits the HN community pretty well. Plenty of terrible people are celebrated for their non- terrible contributions.
lispm
Even non-terrible people for their terrible contributions.
hcarvalhoalves
What amazing time the brink of the XX century might have been to inventors. Not only one of the first automobiles, but sporting an electric engine, a technology invented some 30 years before.
cl8ton
Here is the factory vid of the new Porsche 918 Spyder Electric Hybrid.

Go from 600/hp to Electric Drive silence with a push of a button.

This car also owns the current lap time record on the Nürburgring (Nordschleife)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9Qs-B5gTmE

venus
Geeze, that's some truly awful CGI in the first section of that video. You can tell the director is well aware, too, cutting away at every opportunity - quite a contrast to the loving treatment the camera later gives the 918.

You'd think Porsche, of all companies, would spend a little more and get something that looks the part.

cl8ton
You think the director was trying to emulate the vid quality from that place and time in the video?
venus
Hadn't thought of that. Even if so, I'd say they still failed - the car doesn't look like an old film, it looks like crappy CGI, with a lazy "blur shadow" underneath and wooden-doll driver.
joshu
fastest record modulo mclaren and ferarri's hypercar showdown, anyway.
oijaf888
Any links to those lap times? I can't find anything definitive other than "under 7 minutes" for McLaren. The 918 seems to be the fastest production car with an actual time that I can find. That ignores the the Radical SR8 since those appear to be pure race cars.
lafar6502
What happened to this nice electric car from 1900s? After 100 years it got transformed into some batmobile that's mostly useless...
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Stratoscope
> Ferdinand Porsche debuted the vehicle, dubbed the Egger-Lohner C.2 Phaeton, on the streets of Vienna in 1989. It was one of the first vehicles of its kind on the Austrian streets– or anywhere else in the world, for that matter.

Like I always say, you gotta watch out for those off-by-a-hundred errors.

kayoone
Its amazing how far the automotive industry has come in a mere 110 years since then. This year the 918 Spyder, McLaren P1 and Ferrari LaFerrari hybrid supercars will fight for the crown of the most advanced sportscar and their tech is simply astonishing.