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'Every engineer and every young girl should be able to drive a Porsche*

That's an essential element of Porsche design philosophy, as laid down by President Dr Ernst Fuhrman, the third head of Porsche to be an engineer. In an exclusive interview with Rex Greenslade he explains this and other aspects of Porsche philosophy and future plans.


It is a measure of how much importance Porsche place on engineering that the Prescient of the company (a position roughly analogous to an English company's Chairman and Managing Director) is not an accountant or lawyer, or even a businessman in the accepted sense of the word; Dr Ernst Fuhrman is an engineer by training and, as anyone from the Weissach technical centre will tell you, is still very much an engineer by inclination.
In view of the company's history — it’s birth as an engineering consultancy first, its growth into a manufacturing company second — this may not be particularly surprising. But it is unusual in successful business circles; engineers are rarely accepted as being good managers. "You cannot, however, compare Porsche with a normal company," says Dr Fuhrman, "for the Porsche Company is so technically loaded. Management is no more than a way of normal, logical thinking about things and it’s easy for an engineer to do that I'm not so prepared to think that you can learn management. You are an intelligent member of society or not, and if not you can't manage."

In fact, Dr Fuhrman is the third engineer to head the Porsche Company, after its founder Professor Ferdinand Porsche and his son. Ferry Porsche. Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1918, Dr Fuhrman attended that City's Technical College as an engineering student in the early '40s, obtaining his Doctor-Engineer diploma in 1950. Between 1947 and 1956 he was the superintendent of the Experimental 'Division (Construction) at Porsche AG. Then joining the supply firm Goetzewerke as Managing Director and Chief Engineer: "I was the first engineer to become Managing Director there too," he recalls. Dr Fuhrman returned to Porsche as Managing Director in 1971, when Ferry Porsche re-organised the company and banished the share-holding Porsche and Piech families from holding executive positions within it.

Even now, much of the work carried out by Porsche at the Weissach technical centre is of a consultative nature for outside clients. And I asked Dr Fuhrman how important this consultancy work was to Porsche. "From a point of view of sales, it's not important — perhaps five per cent. But there are many other reasons why the consultancy work is so important to us. To a large extent car production is selling parts that you buy and assemble to the proportion of our profit from

Consultancy is greater than the proportion of our sales.
"On the other hand, we couldn’t afford a modern development centre only for our own cars, because the cost of developing each car would be twice what it is now and we'd be limited to experiences only in sports cars. We'd have no ideas about all the other possibilities in automobile engineering Now we work with big cars, small cars, trucks, tanks, with different engines, with all sorts of possibilities to save petrol: we have a good survey from our other activities and that comes back to our own cars. It could never happen if we were just on the narrow road of sports cars all the time."

The pressures of improved fuel economy, less money to spend generally, are ever-increasing would these pressures affect Porsche's future plans? Dr Fuhrman: "We have to do all the things that other car manufacturers do. We have to sell a safe car with good exhaust emissions, not too much noise, low fuel consumption, good road handling and comfort and so on. The sports car has always been a good basis: light weight, good aerodynamics. Good road holding (which is safe) and consequently low fuel consumption, though that hasn't been so important before. So the sports car was always in a good direction and we haven't had to change like others. The American car was in the wrong direction, and the things they have to change now are much bigger than ours."

But with less money available to spend, will there be a trend towards more 924s and fewer 928s, for instance? "Nobody knows. We produce a model mix now which is much safer than before when we had only the 911. Secondly, we have a share of the market which is so small that I think there will always be enough buyers to buy our cars
"Our cars will always be more expensive than others for we produce only 50 to 100 cars a day To sell a cheap car you need 500 or 1,000 a day production, and from the point of view of who has the capital in our company we will never become a very big company. Therefore our cars will always be in the mid/upper price ranges "

But always a sports car? Dr Fuhrman cagily answered: "We think sports cars are a good field for us to find our customers for the prices. But it is no must. We don’t think that Porsches must always be sports cars; but they will be special."
He added, however we have a tradition of 30 years in building sports cars. Everyone knows the Porsche is sports car so why shouldn't we continue to do so?"
The Porsche philosophy of car design goes much deeper than that, Of course Motor believes, for instance, that the Porsche is the most practical of the supercars and we have said many times so in our road tests. It is interesting to hear Dr Fuhrman confirm that this was one of Porsche's design goals. "We give our customer a car that's as sporty as possible but also makes sense in everyday use. You can use our car — 924, 928 or 911 — as a sports car; you can see it on racetracks, you can use it for long distances; but you can also go into the city with it in the evening. This combination between a good performance cars with direct handling and so on, and a car you can use in town reasonably well, this is what we like to do.
"There are sports cars when are more effective, but if you drive them around town you have to change the spark plugs That is what we don't like to have I like cars that you can use everyday, and are easy to use like that. I always have good cars from my company with high performance, but my wife is an average driver yet she can get in the car and drive it. The first turbo 911 I drove for two years before it was on sale, but my wife didn't know anything about that. She jumped in the car and drove it.

"That is the Porsche philosophy: every young girl and every engineer can drive the car. That's the way it should be "


The cheapest Porsche now available is the 924, what might almost be called a Porsche for the masses but Dr Fuhrman doesn't believe that the 924's introduction has diluted the Porsche mystique you must remember that we develop a car for a long time The 924 now five years old and the 911 is 16, yet we will continue to produce the 911, at least until it is 20 years! The first step was the Carrera GT and then there was the Le Mans car. You will find that we will bring the 924 up step by step."
Would that include, I wondered, more Porsche parts, such as a Porsche-designed engine instead of the Audi 100-based unit presently used? "Maybe, one year," answered Dr Fuhrman, with a wry smile.

For any company the development burden presented by legislation is heavy, but for the small company it is particularly so. It isn't helped by the number of different legislative bodies throughout the world and like most other companies Porsche believe that common legislation for the whole world would be best "Then we couldn’t concentrate our development work and come to our results quicker. cheaper and better "
Was it good, I wondered, that governments should legislate of should the companies be left to look after themselves? Surprisingly, perhaps, Dr Fuhrman considers some legislation to be necessary.

"I can give you some very simple examples Safety belts were invented before legislation and they were offered to the public but nobody bought them. Now say I want to sell you a car with better emissions. This is a 928 with 250 bhp that costs 50,000 DM and this is one with 220 bhp and it costs 65,000 DM — but has much better emissions Now tell me which car you'd decide to buy If we need better exhaust emissions then the only way is to legislate Because with the free market and the customer it’s the only way to get started."

But Dr Fuhrman believes strongly that al legislation must be questioned: is this the cheapest way for the best results? "I think that maybe industry didn't collaborate enough with government at the beginning to come to reasonable taws The only way is with good collaboration going step by step, giving industry enough time and industry using this time. I had lots of discussions with our government and they didn't believe that it wasn't possible to change a car within one or two years When I told them it takes us seven years to design a new car.

And how much it costs in time and money for this and that change they didn't believe it."
It mustn't be forgotten; Dr Fuhrman went on, that the advantages of any new law only become effective very slowly. As only about 10 per cent of the cars on the road are new each year, reducing the importance of whether any legislation is for enactment in, say, one year or four years. "So I say, go ahead slow (as it's much cheaper) but steadily "

A much-discussed topic in recent years in Germany has been autobahn speed limits West Germany is the only European country to have unrestricted motorways (though there is an "advisory" one of 130 kph and Dr Fuhrman follows the strongly held views of the rest of the German motor industry that a formal speed limit should not be introduced "Speed should be limited by the driver not by the government If you drive on an autobahn with a good car, with good tyres, with good weather and traffic conditions and you slept well and you're in a good mood, then 220 kph is absolutely safe nothing can happen.

"But if you drive on the autobahn with an old worn car, with rather flat bad tyres, in bad weather and you're upset because your President fired you five minutes, ago, then you could be in danger at 70 kph So what is a speed limit of 120 or 130 kph? We should educate people and help them understand that a speed limit is important for the driver "

As far as fuel economy is concerned, Dr Fuhrman believes that so few people drive above 130 kph that the saving in petrol consumption would be minimal, say 0.2 per cent intelligent driving will save far more than that.

Would a speed limit be to the disadvantage of the German motor industry technically? "The quality of the cars would come down. No question. US cars are good for US conditions, but in Europe their brakes are bad and their handling is bad — you can't keep on the road at 160'180 kph The same would happen with German cars, because German engineers are no better than American engineers. We need better cars, and we need better brakes, so we have them.

"If we had a speed limit here, you can be sure that the next day we'd have a proposal from a staff member who would show me that we could save several hundred Deutschmarks if we have brakes for the speed limit I throw him out of the office, and the next day I throw another out in five weeks I have the cheap brakes'"

In fact, Dr Fuhrman is widely respected within Porsche for his firm and wise decisions and while he classes himself as a mechanical engineer rather than an automobile engineer, there is no doubt that he loves driving cars as well as designing and making them: "I like to drive cars. If you can't drive cars any more, you shouldn't be head of Porsche.

Equally he keeps his workload within bounds, sticking to a seven-hour or eight-hour day and no visits to the office at weekends "This is a matter of how long a man can work, some people can work Saturday, half of Sunday and get to the office every day at seven. I congratulate them I can't do it."
Married with two sons (both of whom are hoping to become Doctors in the near future, one in engineering, one in medicine), Dr Fuhrman often travels abroad at the weekends, or goes to a race in which Porsche are competing, but "I don't count that as work!"

From the time that Professor Porsche raced his first-ever car, the electric Loner, motor racing has been very much part of Porsche philosophy. Why have Porsche carried on racing for all this time? "For a mixture of reasons one reason is that it is a tradition and has been for 70 years in the '20s and '30s racing was important as a means of development of cars. This isn't so important any more but racing its still a strong motivation for our engineers. You get answers in such a short period of time — months instead of years in production. Racing is an excellent school for ngineers.

Last but not least, racing is a good advertisement for the company. As you know all the big companies withdrew from motor racing but now they've come back — because of the advertising "

Few Presidents of car companies have much enthusiasm for motor racing, so Dr Fuhrman’s attitude is like a breath of fresh air. It should be remembered, however, that it was Dr Fuhrman who designed the four-overhead-camshaft Porsche four-cylinder engine in 1955, enabling them to become really competitive on the racetracks for the first time. This engine was fitted to the Type 356-1500 GS, later re-named the Carrera. Which was enormously successful this type of production- based racing has typified Porsche’s competitive exploits and is clearly one they prefer.

"The relationship between the 924 GT Le Mans car and the road car is close. We prefer that a racing car should have connections with the problems we have in the street "

Where did the ill-fated Indy project fit into rationale then? "Sometimes
you have to leave the normal way of life and this was the exception "
There are some things about modern racing that Dr Fuhrman dislikes, among them very wide tyres and races that are stopped if it rains ("I can't stop on the autobahn if it starts raining!"). But above all "We are pushing petrol consumption racing. In Indianapolis they have a very wise way of limiting the fuel (alcohol). Every pit has a tank and if the tank is empty the car is stopped You’re out For many years it's been this way, and I think it’s the only way for Le Mans, rallying, even Grand Prix racing to go down.

"There are so many complicated rules to make racing cars slower and less dangerous. The easiest way is to limit the petrol They discuss four valves and not four valves, supercharging or no supercharging and all other complicated formulae Leave them as the entrants like it One litre, two litres, five litres — it doesn't matter. You get so many litres of petrol-l, this is the distance and whoever's the first there wins this would be the simplest rule "

Would Porsche be attracted to F1 if it were based on fuel consumption and had treaded tyres' "If Grand Prix motor racing became closer to production cars it would give us more interest to come in No question "
There is no doubt that Porsche feel bitter about the Indy farce, having invested much money in engine development only to find the rules changed overnight "They released a new set of rules on July 1 st and within three weeks they were discussing them again! These people over there handle racing differently from us. They are a few who make money out of the racing and are quite enthusiastic about it. They handle the rules themselves and can react very quickly. We can’t we are preparing on a longer term. For instance, we have started with the 924 at Le Mans now but we will see it running for four years, it will run for first place at Le Mans in the next three or four years. This you can only do when you know what is happening from year to year and can then invest time and money."

One feels that Indy racing's toss (and it looks more and more that way) will be European motor racing's gain, even to the extent of Porsche in F1 There are some very big "Buts" however, not the least being that Grand Prix racing has hardly been stable of late. Thus far Dr Fuhrman has seen no chance for Porsche in F1 for: "We could only come in with a turbocharged engine and you can see with Renault that a turbocharged engine is not successful I told them at the start and nobody believed me Renault has at the moment the biggest investment and in relation to that only small success.

"They're not successful because the equivalency factor between supercharged and non-supercharged engines is not fair it is not because Renault aren't good engineers they are excellent. So we haven't gone in
But I have heard that a formula with just supercharged engines has been discussed this would be a new aspect for us. But again it must be a formula which we are sure will last for three to five years, otherwise we would not begun to invest."