Ferdinand Porsche - Return To Stuttgart

Return To Stuttgart

The Porsche family returned to Stuttgart in 1949 not knowing how to restart their business. The banks would not give them credit, as the company's plant was still under American embargo and could not serve as collateral. So Ferry Porsche took one of the limited series 356 models from Gmünd and visited Volkswagen dealers to raise some orders. He asked the dealers to pay for the ordered cars in advance. He even wrote a letter to the bank's director to thank him for refusing.

The serial version made in Stuttgart had a steel body welded to the central-tube platform chassis instead of the aluminum body used in the small Gmünd-made series. When Ferry Porsche resurrected the company he counted on series production figures of about 1,500. More than 78,000 Porsche 356s were manufactured in the following 17 years.

Porsche was later contracted by Volkswagen for additional consulting work and received a royalty on every Volkswagen Type I (Beetle) car manufactured. This provided Porsche with a comfortable financial situation as more than 20 million Type I were built.

In November 1950, Porsche visited the Wolfsburg Volkswagen factory for the first time since the end of World War II. Porsche spent his visit chatting with Volkswagen president Heinrich Nordhoff about the future of VW Beetle, which were already being produced in large numbers.

A few weeks later, Porsche suffered a stroke. He did not fully recover, and died on 30 January 1951.

In 1996, Porsche was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame and in 1999 posthumously won the award of Car Engineer of the Century.

In 2010 an official memorial was erected in Porsche's birthplace in Vratislavice nad Nisou, Czech Republic, featuring a Porsche 356.