1900 Porsche Semper Vivus

Those indined to think of Dr. Ferdinand Porsche's greatest achievements might consider themselves spoiled for choice. This, after all, is the man responsible for the VW Beetle, D-type Auto Union and the 356. But standing alone in the imposing setting of Castle Solitude we find another candidate. The Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus. Imagine if at the end of the 19th century the young Ferdinand had done as expected and followed his father's footsteps into the plumbing trade. Happily for us his engineering aspirations extended somewhat further than negotiating his way around a U-bend and soon the call came from coachbuilder Jacob Lohner to design a rather different kind of car. Electric cars were big news around the turn of the century, when such contraptions were considered just as likely to form the future of cars as dirty, noisy, dangerous gasoline-powered cars. But they faced then the same issues they do today: they ran out of current.

What Porsche came up with was so clever it's only now, 112 years later, that car manufacturers are starting to get to grips with its potential. His car would have electric motors in their from wheel hubs but when their batteries started to run flat, two conventional petrol engines could be fired up to operate as generators, providing the electricity needed to keep the car going. It was not only the world's first fully functioning hybrid, it was a genuine range extender too, in almost the same way as the Chevrolet Volt is today, though you could not plug it into the mains. Even then, its range was around 120 miles, which is more than an all-electric Nissan Leaf will man age today.

It's cleverer even than that. Because it possesses the ability to brake the from wheels through reversing the electric motors and thanks to a reasonably conventional handbrake operating on the rear wheels, it was also the first car with an effective four-wheel brake system. You'll also be amused to learn, then, so complex was the powertrain and battery pack by the standards of the day, and so bad was the ride quality on artillery wheels with solid tyres at the back, the entire passenger compartment and powertrain of the car has springing independent to the rest of the car, so you can stand beside it and rock the middle of the car from left to right while the rest stands implacably still. So it's the first twin-chassis car, too, And there were you thinking it was the Lotus 88.

Sadly the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus failed to live up to its claim of always being alive and the one and only prototype disappeared. And until someone finds the bam in which it has sat out the last century, the only way to understand what it had to offer was to build another. Which is exactly what Porsche did, unveiling it to gasps at the Geneva Motor Show alongside the cornpany's latest road car to offer hybrid power, the Panamera. And before it embarked on a round the world tour, a few intrepid hacks were invited to Schloss Solitude to drive it.

It is a vast and terrifying beast, potentially capable of 40mph though not with me anywhere near it. And with the greatest respect to the late Professor Porsche, it did come with one extraordinary flaw, even by the standards of what could be expected in 1900. Having wheelmounted electric motors is sound science because there is no power lost in transmission but they do make those wheels rather heavy. If the 84kg each rear wheel weighs sounds a lot, it's nothing compared to those at the front. Complete with electric motor, each wheel weighs 270kg, which means over a half a tonne of unsprung weight on the front axle alone. The ramifications of this will become clear in a minute.

But first it's time to demonstrate its hybrid capabilities which Hubert Drescher, the man charged by Porsche to recreate the hybrid duly does. He fires up the two thumping great single cylinder De Dion engines (though Richard von Frankenburg's biography of Porsche says the original used Daimler power) and promptly burns his arm on an exhaust. If its creator is unable to operate the machine without personal injury, what chance have I?

Wisely the De Dions are shut down before I climb aboard: we shall be operating on electrical power only today.

You sit high enough to make a Cayenne's driving position feel like a Boxster. It is incredibly exposed up here. Happily making the machine move could hardly be simpler: you chaose which one of three speeds you want to use using a selector on your right and take your foot off the only pedal the contraption possesses. Able to drive it only within the courtyard of the Schloss and mindful of the fact that Herr Drescher insists on trotting next to his machine so he can yank on the emergency brake if necessary, I'm told first is the one and only speed we'll be using today.

And so, in close to complete silence, the thing comes to life. It starts to move and I start to smile. It feels so unlike any other car I've driven, even veterans from the same era, yet the wisdom of the Profs design shines forth. At least until you find a corner. That's when you discover there's not been an elephant in the room all this time, so much as a woolly mammoth.

The one thing you can count upon in any properly functioning car from any era is that when you turn the steering wheel, the car will change direction. It's what the wheel is for. But here we have the exception. The first time I tumed the wheel of the Semper Vivus, it had no discemible effect on our direction of travel at all. Crashing are-creation of a 112-year-old range extender hybrid into the walls of Schloss Solitude would have made for one of my more unusual insurance daims, but for a moment it looked possible.

Trying not to shaw the panic that now rose fast within me to the rapidly growing crowd of curious onlookers I grinned inanely and turned the wheel some more. And then some more again. Finally after what felt like some hours of shuffling, the machine did, at last start to deflect from its suicidal course. So pleased was I to have finally got some lock on, I forgot completely that the job was only half do ne. Sooner or later I would have to get the lock off too. The fact that Solitude Castle still looked proudly and unmolested out over the Swabian countryside proves I made it in the end.

Of course, almost all the concepts embraced by the Semper Vivus - the electric wheel motors, twin chassis, range-extender hybrid drive and so on, were abandoned by Porsche and to this day have yet to appear on a production car bearing his name. But perhaps that's just because he was a century ahead of his time. It would not be a brave but stupid man who bet we'd still be saying the same 100 years from now

Story: Andrew Frankel
gtpurelyporsche dot com

December 4, 2012, 4:24 am