A Father in Prison, a Son Who Built Porsche

In December 1945 Ferdinand Porsche, the man behind the Volkswagen Beetle, was arrested in France and locked in a prison cell in Dijon. His son Ferry was left with an office in an old Austrian sawmill and no money. This is the story of how Ferry Porsche freed his father and built the first Porsche, the 356, with a handful of engineers in the mountains of Carinthia. It starts with a tinsmith's son in Bohemia who secretly taught himself electricity at night, built an electric car for the 1900 Paris World Exhibition and went on to design racing cars for Mercedes and Auto Union. It does not skip the dark chapter: Ferdinand worked for Hitler's regime, designed its people's car and its military vehicles, and after the war that past caught up with him. With his father behind bars, Ferry kept the small team alive by repairing cars and building farm machines. A racing car design for the Italian company Cisitalia paid his father's bail. And in June 1948, in a former sawmill in Gmünd, the first car to carry the Porsche name was registered for the road. A Porsche history documentary about a father, a son, and the car they built after losing almost everything. Chapters 00:00 A cell in Dijon 00:47 The tinsmith's son 02:09 Electric dreams 03:33 A son behind the wheel 04:49 The people's car, and the war 06:06 The sawmill in Gmünd 07:11 The arrest 08:33 The price of freedom 09:33 The car he dreamed of 11:14 Home to Stuttgart 12:25 The name on the car Porsche Evolution https://youtu.be/eC2wDbsGh3U Porsche 911 Story https://youtu.be/qNfaaSZDQeA #Porsche #Porsche356 #CarHistory