Ferdinand Porsche built a petrol-electric hybrid car back in 1901
More than a century before hybrids became fashionable, a young Austrian engineer bolted a Daimler petrol engine to a generator feeding electric motors in the wheel hubs. Ferdinand Porsche's 1901 Mixte is the first petrol-electric hybrid on record, and its creator never finished a formal engineering degree.
Porsche was born in 1875 in northern Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary, the son of a master panel-beater. Fascinated by electricity, he attended night classes in nearby Reichenberg while working in his father's shop by day. At 18 he moved to Vienna to join an electrical firm, sat in on university lectures whenever he could, and built the company's first electric wheel-hub motor, racing it in 1897.
At the coachbuilder Jakob Lohner, supplier to Emperor Franz Joseph, he developed a battery car driven by motors in its front hubs. A four-motor version for an English customer appeared at the 1900 Paris World Exhibition, but its 1,800 kg of lead-acid batteries made hill climbs painfully slow. His answer, the Mixte of 1901, used an engine as a generator, with only a small backup battery. Over 300 Lohner-Porsche chassis sold by 1906, mostly for trucks, buses and fire engines, and Porsche himself won the 1901 Exelberg Rally in one.
His career then climbed quickly. Drafted in 1902, he served as chauffeur to Archduke Franz Ferdinand. As chief designer at Austro-Daimler from 1906, he produced the streamlined car that swept the top three places in the 1910 Prince Henry Trial, and a 1922 design won 43 of its 53 races. At Daimler in Stuttgart his supercharged designs led to the Mercedes-Benz SSK, but the board rejected his idea for a small, light car, and he left in 1929.
In April 1931 he founded his own design consultancy in Stuttgart, backed by his son-in-law Anton Piëch and Adolf Rosenberger and staffed by trusted colleagues and his son Ferry. The firm went on to create the Volkswagen Beetle and Auto Union racing cars. Porsche also joined the Nazi Party and designed heavy tanks for Germany's war effort. He died in 1951, and in 1999 was named Car Engineer of the Century.
Source: Ferdinand Porsche
