The German car industry may be on its knees but Porsche, a company that takes pride in its motto “nothing is impossible” will cock a corporate snook at its detractors today by unveiling a €100m (£93m) museum dedicated to promoting the glory of its iconic sports cars.
Even before today’s inauguration, the new building, located next to the company’s headquarters at Zuffenhausen near Stuttgart, has been nicknamed the “Porsche Cathedral”. It contains more steel than the Eiffel Tower and a “rolling exhibition” of some 300 cars that can be started up in situ.
“The exhibition halls have been kept almost completely white, because the elements of colour are provided by the cars themselves,” explained the museum’s director Achim Stejskal.
The vault-like interior of the museum is equipped with elevators, gently inclining ramps, a roof terrace, seminar rooms, sophisticated car workshops and a gourmet restaurant called “Christopherus” – the aim is to create an ambience that will cause the likes of Jeremy Clarkson and his Teutonic equivalents to drool uncontrollably.
The museum was meant to open last year for the Porsche company’s 60th anniversary. But the building has been completed months later than planned, at the start of a deepening recession and costing double the €50m originally earmarked for the project.
The main part of the exhibition contains 80 Porsche designs including the original 1930s Volkswagen Beetle conceived by Ferdinand Porsche himself. It was the car that inspired Adolf Hitler, and relaunched with British help after the Second World War.
All of the cars in the museum are kept in perfect running order and are maintained to compete in vintage motor rallies and car shows worldwide. Visitors can watch the cars being fine-tuned by a team of resident mechanics in glass-walled workshops on the first floor. A stable of racing cars, more than 150 silver trophies and an automated flashing script containing key quotes from top drivers is meant to underline Porsche’s prowess as a grand prix car manufacturer with more than 28,000 trophies under its belt.
Pride of place is given to the legendary Porsche Type 64 – a drop-head, hand-made aluminium-bodied sports car that is held to be the mother of all subsequent Porsches. The car, also from Ferdinand Porsche’s drawing board, was specifically designed to compete in a Berlin to Rome car rally between the fascist Axis powers of Italy and Germany in 1939. The outbreak of the war meant that the rally never took place, but the revolutionary Porsche T64 survived and was put on the road for the first time in 1948.
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