Who is Porsche?

Gardens by the Bay, 25 January 2024. It has rained all day and the guests, flown in from every Porsche market on earth, are waiting under a sculpture that looks like coral. As it gets dark the rain stops, the lights come up, and two cars roll out of the installation: a Macan Turbo in Ice Grey, and a Macan 4 in a new purple called Provence. It is the first time an international production car has had its world premiere in Singapore. Oliver Blume, Porsche's chairman, looks around at the Supertrees and says this place proves that change is possible.¹²

He was talking about the city. He might as well have been talking about the company, because the firm that chose Singapore to launch its most important electric car had started, a hundred and twenty-four years earlier, with an electric car nobody wanted.³

The professor

Ferdinand Porsche was born in 1875 in Maffersdorf, a Bohemian village that is now in the Czech Republic, the son of a tinsmith who wanted him to take over the shop. He wired the family house for electricity as a teenager instead, and by 24 he was working for Ludwig Lohner, a Vienna coachbuilder who wanted to sell cars to the aristocracy. The car they showed at the Paris World's Fair in 1900 had no gearbox and no driveshaft. Porsche had put an electric motor inside each front wheel hub. Within a year he had bolted a petrol generator to the back to make a hybrid, and put motors in all four hubs to make the world's first all-wheel-drive car. The batteries weighed as much as a small car on their own, and the idea went to sleep for a century.³⁴

He spent the next three decades as a hired engineer for other people, at Austro-Daimler, at Daimler in Stuttgart, at Steyr, quitting or being pushed out of each one for the same reason: he wanted to build what he wanted to build. On 25 April 1931 he registered a design bureau in Stuttgart under his own name, with his son Ferry, his son-in-law Anton Piëch and a handful of engineers. It did not make cars. It designed them, for whoever would pay.³⁵

The customer who paid most was the German state. Porsche designed the people's car that became the Volkswagen Beetle, and once the war came the bureau's drawing boards were given over to military work. Ferdinand Porsche was held by the French for twenty months afterwards, and the company came out of the war with its name, its engineers and not much else.³⁵⁶

Gmünd

The company had moved out of Stuttgart to escape the bombing and was working out of a sawmill in Gmünd, a village in the Austrian Alps, when Ferry Porsche decided to stop designing cars for other people. The car he built there was small, aluminium-bodied, and used a tuned Beetle engine hung out behind the rear axle because that was what they had. It was registered for the road on 8 June 1948 as the 356 No. 1. Ferry's line about it is the one on the wall at Porsche Studio Singapore today: in the beginning he looked around and could not find the car he dreamed of, so he decided to build it himself.⁷⁸

They built 52 cars by hand in Gmünd and then went home to Stuttgart in 1950. The professor died in January 1951, having seen the first Porsches leave the Zuffenhausen works. By the time the 356 was retired in 1965 it had sold 76,000 copies and made the name.⁷⁸

Its replacement was shown at the Frankfurt show in September 1963 as the 901, styled by Ferry's son Butzi, with a new flat-six behind the rear wheels. Peugeot objected that it owned the rights to three-digit names with a zero in the middle, so before it went on sale the zero became a one. The 911 has been in production ever since, with the engine in the same wrong place, because customers refused every attempt to move it.⁹

The 911 has had the engine in the same wrong place for sixty years, because customers refused every attempt to move it.

The SUV that paid for everything

By 1992 Porsche was making about 14,000 cars a year, losing money on most of them, and taking around 120 hours to build each one. Toyota took a fraction of that. The family board hired a 40-year-old production engineer called Wendelin Wiedeking, who brought Japanese consultants into Zuffenhausen, cut the workforce by a third, and then did the thing the purists never forgave: he decided a sports car company should build a four-door off-roader.¹⁰¹¹

The Cayenne went on sale in 2002, built in a new plant in Leipzig on a platform shared with the Volkswagen Touareg. Enthusiasts called it a betrayal. It became the best-selling Porsche within a couple of years, funded every 911 and GT car that followed, and turned Porsche into the most profitable carmaker per vehicle in the world. The Macan, a smaller SUV built in the same Leipzig plant from 2014 and named after the Indonesian word for tiger, did the same trick again and overtook the Cayenne as the company's biggest seller.¹¹¹²

The money also went to Wiedeking's head. Between 2005 and 2008 Porsche quietly bought up Volkswagen shares, and by late 2008 it controlled, through shares and options, more than 74 per cent of a company many times its size, financed with debt and derivatives. When the financial crisis arrived the debt could not be refinanced. Volkswagen turned around and bought Porsche's car business instead, completing the deal on 1 August 2012. Wiedeking left in 2009. The Porsche and Piëch families kept control of the holding company that controls Volkswagen, so in one sense they won anyway, but Porsche AG has been a Volkswagen subsidiary ever since.¹⁰¹³¹⁴

Ten years later Volkswagen floated a slice of it. Porsche AG listed on the Frankfurt exchange on 29 September 2022 at a valuation of about 75 billion euros, one of the largest European stock market debuts on record. The man running both companies at the time was Oliver Blume.⁵¹⁵

Mission E

The professor's idea woke up at the Frankfurt show in September 2015. The Mission E was a four-door electric saloon concept with 600 horsepower, 800-volt electrics and a claimed 15-minute charge, and Porsche said it would build it. Four years later, on 4 September 2019, it did, unveiling the Taycan simultaneously in three places, including a stage beside Niagara Falls. The point of the Taycan was to prove that a Porsche could be electric and still be a Porsche. It proved it.¹⁶¹⁷

The harder job was the Macan, because the Macan is the car most Porsche buyers actually buy. Blume, chairman since 2015, made the decision in 2019 that the second-generation car would be electric only, and in 2022 set a company target of 80 per cent electric sales by 2030. The petrol Macan was withdrawn from Europe in 2024. The electric one was unveiled in Singapore that January, and its bigger sibling, the Cayenne Electric, followed in November 2025.^111151819

Then the market changed its mind. Luxury EV demand cooled, China stopped buying Porsches the way it had, and by the time Blume handed the Porsche chairmanship to Michael Leiters on 1 January 2026, keeping the Volkswagen Group job, the 80 per cent target had been dropped. A week later he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that on the Macan, Porsche had been wrong. A petrol SUV to sit alongside the electric Macan is due in 2028, and future 718s will get engines after all. The company that started with an electric car and went back to petrol for a century is now trying to hold both at once.¹⁸¹⁹²⁰

Beach Road

Porsche has been sold in Singapore by the same family for forty years. Karsono Kwee founded Eurokars in 1985 with a single business, Stuttgart Auto, the Porsche dealer, and built it into the largest privately owned car group in the country, with Rolls-Royce, BMW, MINI, Mazda and McLaren among the badges. Its last showroom was at 29 Leng Kee Road.²¹²²

The factory came closer in 2001, when Porsche Asia Pacific set up its regional headquarters in Singapore; it runs thirteen markets from here, from Malaysia and Thailand to New Zealand and Mongolia. In June 2022 Porsche and Eurokars formed Porsche Singapore Pte Ltd, a joint venture that took over sales and aftersales from Stuttgart Auto and moved the brand closer to selling direct. The old Leng Kee showroom became a BMW dealership.²¹²³²⁴

The first thing the new company did was a pop-up shop beside Guoco Tower in January 2023, with the 550 Spyder that Hans Herrmann drove in the Carrera Panamericana flown in from Stuttgart to sit in the middle of it. The permanent home opened a year later: Porsche Studio Singapore, 8,500 square feet on two floors at the corner of Beach Road and Rochor Road, with a lifestyle boutique, a Café Carrera run by Baker & Cook, a car hoist in the floor, and a weekly Porsches and Pretzels evening for owners. It is where the Macan on this site's price list is sold.²⁵²⁶⁸

The next thing is bigger. In May 2024, four months after the Macan premiere, Porsche announced that its eleventh Experience Centre worldwide, and the first designed from the start for a whole region rather than one country, will be built near Changi Airport with a handling track of more than two kilometres. It is due to open in 2027 and will be Singapore's first permanent driving facility of any kind.²⁷²⁸

What it is like to live with one

We spent a stretch of September 2026 with the base Macan Electric, in the same Provence purple that rolled out under the coral at Gardens by the Bay. Our review found the calmest, best-finished cabin we have sat in this year, a chassis that tells you the sports car people were in the room, and a centre screen that is small and simple on purpose. We also stood next to the Cayenne Electric at its Singapore debut, which you can read about in our first look.²⁹³⁰

That is the whole company in one car. A hub-motor electric car in 1900, a Beetle engine in a sawmill, a flat-six in the wrong place for sixty years, an SUV that paid for all of it, and now a purple electric one launched under the Supertrees. Porsche has changed its mind about almost everything except what a Porsche should feel like from the driver's seat. That part, on the evidence of the Macan, it has not touched.