Long before the Porsche 356, 911 or Taycan, a 22-year-old Ferdinand Porsche was experimenting with electricity in Vienna. Porsche had joined the electrical company Vereinigte Elektrizitäts-AG Béla Egger in 1893 and eventually rose to lead its testing department. In 1898, while Egger was working with carriage manufacturer Ludwig Lohner, Porsche became involved in development of the Egger-Lohner C.2 Phaeton. Porsche today describes it as the oldest surviving vehicle on which Ferdinand Porsche worked on—and let everyone know it by allegedly stamping P1 on many part he developed.
At the heart of the carriage-like machine was Porsche’s distinctive “Octagon” electric motor, named for its eight-sided housing. The 287-pound motor sat near the rear axle and produced about 3 horsepower normally and as much as 5 horsepower at maximum output. Porsche lists a top speed of 25 km/h, or about 15.5 mph, and a range of approximately 80 kilometers, or 50 miles. A 12-position controller provided six forward settings, two for reverse and four for braking. Four vehicles were constructed on the basic chassis with different bodies supplied by Lohner, making the C.2 far more sophisticated than its wooden wheels and horse-carriage appearance might suggest.
It Was Already Winning Races in 1899
The early electric car also gave Ferdinand Porsche a taste of competition. In 1899, one of the Egger-Lohner electrics entered a long-distance contest held in conjunction with the International Motor Show in Berlin. Porsche’s 2014 account says Ferdinand drove with three passengers aboard and finished 18 minutes ahead of the next competitor while also recording the lowest energy consumption in the field. Porsche’s current museum history confirms that an Egger-Lohner based on the C.2 chassis won first prize in the event.
Electric propulsion remained central to Porsche’s work after he joined Lohner directly in 1899. He soon developed electric motors mounted within the wheel hubs, eliminating much of the conventional drivetrain. In 1900, a Lohner-Porsche electric vehicle using the system appeared at the Paris exposition, followed by an all-wheel-drive electric competition car with motors at all four wheels. These cars carried the Porsche name, long before the Type 64 or the Porsche 356/1
Porsche also combined gasoline engines, generators and electric motors in the Semper Vivus, regarded by Porsche as the world’s first functional gasoline-electric hybrid. More than a century before the Taycan, Ferdinand Porsche was already exploring many of the questions surrounding electric range, performance and energy efficiency that automakers are still addressing today.
The “Lost” Porsche P1 Returns
When Porsche presented the surviving C.2 Phaeton at its Stuttgart museum in 2014, the company told an irresistible story. The car had supposedly been stored in an Austrian warehouse in 1902 and remained untouched for more than a century before being recovered. Porsche also said Ferdinand had marked important components with “P1,” meaning “Porsche Number 1,” giving the vehicle its unofficial nickname. The incomplete survivor, missing its original body, was displayed with translucent blue panels suggesting the outline of the phaeton it once carried.
But historians quickly challenged parts of that narrative. Auto Bild reported that the chassis had actually been held in storage by Vienna’s Technical Museum since 1918 and had been inspected there as recently as 2009 before being traded out of the collection. Photographs from that inspection also raised questions about some of the later “P1” markings and about how much of the automobile should properly be credited to Ferdinand Porsche rather than Egger and Lohner. Porsche itself now uses noticeably more careful language, calling the C.2 the oldest surviving design on which Ferdinand Porsche worked rather than simply the first Porsche.
Whatever one calls it, the surviving machine remains extraordinary. Today it occupies a prominent position at the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, where it serves as the starting point for the company’s historical exhibition. The first Porsche-branded production automobile was still half a century away in 1898, but Ferdinand Porsche’s oldest surviving automotive work already ran on batteries. In that sense, the Taycan did not represent an abandonment of Porsche history. It brought one of the oldest ideas in that history back to the road.
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