“The Porsche myth lives on and will never go away!” Wolfgang Porsche made this legendary promise to the company’s employees in Zuffenhausen in July 2009 to build confidence in difficult times.
Today, the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Porsche AG celebrates his 80th birthday and that sentence can be confirmed: The sports car manufacturer is successfully listed on the stock market, has quickly entered the DAX stock index and has set sales and revenue records for successively in recent years, thanks to an extremely solid business model.
The transformation towards electric mobility is also progressing as planned. And this is largely due to the person who has chaired the Porsche Supervisory Board since 2007. On the same day as the birthday celebration, the Board meets at the Volkswagen Group Annual General Meeting in Berlin. There Wolfgang Porschewho is also a member of the Supervisory Boards of Porsche Holding SE and Audi AG, expects to be re-elected for the next five years.
For Porsche employees, “WoPo” has been an institution and a figure of reference for many years. Oliver Blume, Chairman of the Board of Management of Porsche AG, refers to him as “a friendly personality for whom work is a vocation”. In fact, he is the recognizable face of the company for many fans and customers of the brand around the world. In the United States and Japan in particular, he enjoys a special reputation among his large legion of followers. For his part, he always wants to be close to the Porsche community, where he truly feels at home.
The Porsche success story is closely linked to the iconic 911 sports car. The same can be said of Wolfgang Porsche, who accompanied its development from the very beginning. At the celebration of the manufacture of the millionth unit of the 911, on May 11, 2017, he recalled: “I was allowed to go with my father on the first trips on the Grossglockner alpine road and I still enjoy the sensations in a 911 just the same. what then. Thanks to this model, the core values of our brand are as enduring today as they have been since the first Porsche 356 No. 1 Roadster in 1948.”
This year also marks the 60th anniversary of the 911. For six decades it has been part of the attractive and very sporty Porsche range, which now includes plug-in hybrids in addition to the models with the internal combustion engine and, with the Taycan, the fully electric. Porsche plans that, by 2030, at least 80% of the sports cars delivered to its customers will be electric. Wolfgang Porsche has become an outspoken fan of electricity. At the same time, he supports Porsche’s investments in the development and production of e-fuels. He considers it a useful complement to the more than 1.3 billion combustion engine vehicles currently on the road around the world.
Wolfgang Porsche, who describes himself as a “Swabian Austrian”, still likes to drive “on the Grossglockner alpine road at half past six in the morning”, always looking ahead. This is typical of him, as Oliver Blume knows from his long collaboration: “Wolfgang Porsche has always been more of a visionary than a driver. He is an important pillar on our way to shape the exclusive and sustainable mobility of tomorrow. We wish him all the best on his birthday and, above all, good health. On behalf of the entire Porsche team, we would like to thank him for his great trust and look forward to continuing the brand’s success story together with him.”
Porsche 911
The 911 was presented at the Frankfurt International Motor Show in 1963. That is why the celebrations will take place throughout these twelve months and, among the many events.
The 911 is the quintessential Porsche, the car that inspires the rest of the company’s models and the one that defines its DNA like no other. In these sixty years of life there have been eight generations and all of them have maintained the essence of the original vehicle, both in design and conception, but always incorporating numerous technological advances to continue being the benchmark for great sports cars.
Concern for sustainability and the environment have also been closely linked to the 911, a car that, despite its features and extraordinary performance, has been a pioneer in adopting mechanisms such as the catalytic converter or direct fuel injection, which contributed to significantly reducing the polluting emissions and that later became popular in the automobile sector.
Today, as always, Porsche continues its commitment to find solutions that improve life on the planet. For this reason, its priority bet is on electric mobility, but without stopping to investigate other ways to reach neutrality in CO2 emissions. And, once again, Porsche has stood out from the rest by making significant investments to, in the future, be able to manufacture synthetic fuels on an industrial scale, a formula that will allow current combustion vehicles to continue operating without polluting. With this solution, the hundreds of thousands of Porsche 911s that continue to roll on the world’s roads (more than 70% of those manufactured since 1963) would have their future guaranteed.
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