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In
1931 in Stuttgart, Ferdinand Porsche founded his company, in order to
bring a small practical car for the masses onto the market, something
which was missing in Germany at that time.
In the Porsche 12, developed as early as 1932 for Zündapp, and
the Porsche 32 for NSU, completed in 1934, the company had two
representative Volkswagen models, which displayed Komenda’s bodywork
design.
When
Hitler came to power in 1933, he financed
Porsche’s development of a racing car, which
Porsche then offered to Auto Union.
In addition to Erwin Komenda, aerodynamics expert Josef Mickl worked out the design for the bodywork of the legendary Porsche-Auto Union racing car.
Ferry Porsche considered Erwin Komenda
the founder of the ‘silver arrow era’;
Komenda designed the bodywork for the first Auto
Union racing car made from a special
corrosion-resistant aluminium alloy, which did
not have to be painted. This meant that an extra 2.5kg of weight was not added to the
car and thus the car met the requirements for
the 750kg racing class.
It is said that when the Mercedes
engineers saw the shiny, silver racing car, they
immediately had the paint scraped off all
Mercedes racing cars!
On the 17th of January 1934, Porsche submitted his idea for a car for the masses to the German Reich’s ministry of transport, with the title, “Exposé regarding the construction of a German Volkswagen (people’s car)”.
Porsche’s
racing cars were extremely successful.
As a result, in 1934 he received the
commission from Hitler – who regarded the
successful Ferdinand Porsche highly – to build
a German people’s car, a ‘Volkswagen’.
Porsche
received the contract for the construction of the German Volkswagen from
Hitler and the RDA (Reichsverband der deutschen Automobilindustrie, the
Reich’s federation for the German car industry).
This fact was noted in Porsche’s project register.
The contract encompassed the development of a saloon, a
convertible saloon, an open-topped ‘bucket car’ and a synthetic
resin saloon with a rear motor in the form of the Volkswagen.
Erwin
Komenda was responsible for the design and styling of the KdF car.
He developed the bodywork for the Volkswagen based on his design
of the Porsche 32. In 1935, the question of a definite bodywork design
had not yet been answered.
Even
before the contract deal was done, many of the member companies of the RDA were
suspect of Porsche’s idea for a cheap people’s car.
Deep, mutual mistrust gave the result that the question of financing the
project became only one of many points of disagreement.
Despite this, the RDA took charge of the expenditure for the construction
of the first two pre-prototypes: the V1, the covered saloon, and the V2, the
convertible, which were built in 1935 in the garage of Porsche’s villa in
Stuttgart’s Feuerbachweg. After
the successful testing of the 1935 prototypes, the V1 and V2, three further
prototypes emerged from the Porsche garage in 1936: the VW I, the VW II and the
VW III. One car with bodywork made
entirely from steel was produced.
Due
to costs, the other two were constructed in a mixture of wood and sheet metal.
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