PJ Media

Looks for me very close to the early Citroen 2 CV. Design theft is very common – look at Miata and the older Lotus.

misanthropicus,

The Miata is a special case. Tom Matano, who drew the original Miata for Mazda, was told by his bosses at Mazda to base the exterior design on that of the Lotus Elan. Since he openly admits that the Miata is derivative of the original Elan, it’s hardly a case of design theft. The Miata is more homage than thievery. Matano told me that he regards the last RX-7 to be his best work because unlike the Miata it’s a clean sheet design.

I don’t mean to belabor the point, but I find the article deceptive. It seems to build a strong case for the similiar features of the two cars, but to anyone that is familiar with automotive design, it’s pretty meaningless.

HoosierHawk,

Schilperoord is an automotive engineer, and knows enough about automotive design that he writes for engineering publications. He thinks his argument that Ganz’ designs influenced Porsche is persuasive. I worked for a tier 1 automotive supplier for more than two decades and now get paid to write about cars and the car biz. I won’t drop names but I’ve discussed automotive design with many leading automotive designers (my current favorite designers are Ian Callum and Franz von Holzhausen). I think it’s fair to say that I’m also familiar with automotive design. While I don’t think it’s 100% compelling, I agree with Schilperoord that his argument is persuasive. Your mileage may vary.

I tried to be fair in the article and laid out both the similarities and differences between the Porsche and Ganz designs. I also said that it was possible that Porsche, Ganz (and Hans Ledwinka) arrived at similar solutions independently. If you think that is deceptive, I think you’re the one who isn’t being impartial.

“Mechanically, it has a platform chassis with a center tube, a rear transaxle with a horizontal engine, a swing axle suspension in the back, and independent suspension in the front. The body is a simple aerodynamic shape that looks very similar to that of the VW Beetle.”

How many mid or rear engine cars do you know of that don’t have a “platform chassis”?

Offhand? Just about every mid or rear engined car not designed by Dr. Porsche. Until recently, most midengine designs used “space frames” made of welded up tubing. The Lotus Europa and Esprit, though, used a backbone chassis, and current Loti have a frame made of bonded and riveted aluminum extrusions. The exoticar companies like Ferrari and Lamborghini are moving from space frames to aluminum and carbon fiber tubs and modules. To my knowledge, nobody today builds a midengine car using a platform chassis.

In the automotive world, the platform chassis is generally associated with early VW and Porsche designs.

Ok, it has a belly pan and there is tunnel to hide the throttle cable, brake line and shift mechanism. Who has ever done it differently?

On the Beetle and early Porsches the belly pan and central tunnel are stressed structural members, as they are on Ganz’ design. Are you sure that you know what a “platform chassis” is?

Rear transaxle with a horizontal engine. All front wheel drive, mid or rear engine cars have transaxles.

Today, yes, but in the late 1920s and early 1930s transaxles were not widely used. The transaxle, btw, along with the midengined layout, was developed by Ernest Rumpler, another Jewish automotive pioneer.

The only kind that don’t are front engine, RWD which have seperate transmissions and axles.

Not necessarily. The Porsche 924/944/968, the current and previous generation Corvette, and all current Maseratis all have RWD and a front mounted engine that is connected by a torque tube to a rear transaxle. I’m pretty sure all current Aston Martins also have a front engine rear transaxle layout. It’s not a new idea either, as it was tried in early 1960s Pontiacs (Google [Pontiac "rope drive"]). Rear transaxles let automakers balance the weight while still allowing a front mounted engine, avoiding the rear visibility and engine service drawbacks to midengine layouts.

I don’t know of any rear engine cars that don’t have flat engines. Of course, the exotic mid engine cars have big V8s or 12s, but they aren’t really “people’s cars” are they?

Actually, I think some Ferraris have used flat “boxer”, horizontally opposed, engines. I’m pretty sure that the only companies that make flat engines these days are Porsche and Subaru. The only company that makes rear engined cars with flat engines is Porsche, with the current iteration of the 911. The niche for, as the great P.J. O’Rourke put it, ass-engine Nazi slot cars, is pretty limited to Porsche. Speaking of ass-engined Nazi cars, the Tatra 97, with its rear mounted V8 (not a flat motor), was very fast on the autobahns and popular with German officers. Rear engine cars have notoriously tricky handling (Google [trailing throttle oversteer]). Apparently Hitler eventually forbade his officers from driving the Tatra 97 because of the many wrecks.

You’re wrong about small rear engined cars all having flat engines. Sunbeam, Simca, Renault and Fiat all made lots of small rear engine cars with upright engine configurations. The Fiat 500, 600 and 850 all had upright rear engines.

The Smart car has a rear mounted engine and I’m pretty sure that the 3 cyl. engine is upright. In the case of the Smart, laying the transversely mounted engine down flat would have made the car longer.

Swing axle rear suspension? The only other alternative is to put in short driveshafts with CV or u-joints. VW started doing this in the early ‘70, but they weren’t popular,they weren’t nearly as strong off road. Where else would the swing axle be on a rear engine car, in front?

You’re looking at things from a modern perspective. Swing axles aren’t ideal because of camber changes as the wheel travels up and down, but in the 1920s and 1930s they were pretty much the state of the art. Ganz was an expert on swing axle suspensions and consulted on the design of the Mercedes Benz 170.

As for front swing axles, I’m sure it’s been done, probably in the early years of the automobile. An argument can be made that the “I-Beam Front Suspension” on Ford pickup trucks was a form of front swing axle.

Independent suspension isn’t a design of suspension, it just means that the front wheels are sprung seperate from each other. Several completely different designs would all be considered “independent”, it’s more of a marketing term.

Independent front suspension is not just a marketing term. There’s a reason why almost no passenger cars made today (except for Jeeps) have solid front axles. Are there many different designs for independent front suspensions? Sure there are. Can they all be engineered to work well? For the most part yes. In the 1920s, many cars, like the Model T, still had a solid front axle, so independent front suspension would have been considered an innovation (particularly on an inexpensive car for the masses), regardless of the actual design. From the drawings it appears that Ganz used a transverse leaf spring, not entirely unlike the current Corvette front suspension. It’s hard to tell from the images I’ve looked at, but it’s possible that Ganz used the leaf spring also as an upper control arm. Porsche used his patented front suspension design based on trailing arms and torsion bars. Porsche’s front suspension design may have been his most enduring invention as it stayed in production for 60 or 70 years (until the original Beetle finally ended Mexican and Brazilian production).

Today, of course, Dr. Porsche’s front suspension design is considered obsolete. There’s a reason why most cars today have front suspensions designed around control arms. However, in the late 1920s or early 1930s, any form of independent front suspension, Ganz’ or Porsche’s would have been an improvement over the Model T.

If you are going to discuss a cars mechanical layout it seems like the fact that it was mid engine would come up first and foremost, that is a big difference.

I pointed out that the major differences were engine layout and front suspension design. If that’s not good enough for you, oh well.

Clearly this design was stolen from a jew by the Nazis.

It’s picky to quibble about spelling, so I haven’t said anything about your other misspellings, but Jew should be capitalized. It’s interesting that you capitalized Nazi but neglected to capitalize Jew.

To say that the “design” was stolen is simply not fair to one of history’s great automotive designers.

So, because Porsche was a gifted engineer he wasn’t capable of moral shortcomings? Remember, we’re talking about a man who used slave laborers in his factory. He was willing to take ideas from Ledwinka, and he was willing to design weapons for the Nazis, but he was too moral to steal from a Jew?

Does it detract from Nuccio Bertone’s legacy to say that he took undue credit for the Lamborghini Miura, which was primarily the work of Gandini, a Bertone employee?

History is history.

Porsche acknowledged taking ideas from other engineers. His infringement of Tatra patents is a matter of record and legal settlement.

Porsche was a great engineer. He was also arguably history’s most amoral engineer, putting his talent to the service of a heinous regime.

A further historical note, we know that Hilter was at the 1933 Berlin Motor show because it was there that He announced the people’s car program.

I just did a search for Hitler’s speech at the 1933 Berlin show, and interestingly I found the following in Bug: the strange mutations of the world’s most famous automobile By Phil Patton.

Immediately after quoting Hitler’s speech about motorizing Germany (along with proposing building the autobahns) Patton says, “In Germany, which had given the world the internal combustion engine and its first applications in an automobile, the phrase “people’s car” had been heard for years. Automobile clubs and magazines like the popular Motorfabrik and its editor, Joseph Ganz, crusaded for such a car; volkswagen and volksauto were already practically generic terms.”

You’re giving Hitler credit for making a speech advocating a “volkswagen” at the same auto show where Standard was displaying Ganz’ “Superior Volkswagen”, already in production and on sale.

In any case, like Patton says, Ganz had been a vocal advocate for the concept of a “volkswagen” since the early 1920s. He wrote for and edited a leading German automotive publication (that is still in print) which gave him a pulpit for his advocacy. He specifically used the term “volkswagen”. Porsche and Ledwinka are dead and we can’t ask them if they were influenced by Ganz’ advocacy of the volkswagen, but it’s not unreasonable to assume Ganz’ ideas had influence.

However the settlement with Tatra does little to further Ganz’ case. If you look at the work of Hans Ledwinka with Tatra, you can clearly see the influence on the Type I, there is no doubt that Porsche used ideas that he obtained from his contacts with Ledwinka.

But what is the story here? Is the story line that a designer for a Czech car company stole the design from a German Jew, but was subsequently stolen from by Porsche?

No, Ganz’ patents that Tatra infringed were different patents than the Tatra patents that VW eventually acknowledged were infringed upon by Porsche and later Volkswagen. Schilperoord goes into detail on Ganz’ patents. It’s easy to see why things could be confusing. Ganz claimed that Tatra infringed on his patents. Later, Porsche acknowledged taking ideas from Tatra’s engineer, Ledwinka. The ideas that Porsche stole from Tatra were not the same Ganz patents that Tatra had previously infringed upon.

All of this is evidence that rather than being a footnote Ganz had an important role in automotive history. Schilperoord is doing a great service to automotive historians. We know that Porsche stole ideas from other engineers. We also know that the Nazis looted art and other valuables from Jews and others. Why is is so far fetched for you to consider that the Nazis and Porsche also looted valuable automotive ideas from a Jew?

Porsche apparently admitted that he had been “looking over Ledwinka’s shoulder”, because Hilter said that was the kind of car he after.

Hitler had nothing to do with that. To begin with, even Porsche’s defenders claim that he was working on small car prototypes (Zundapp Type 12, NSU Type 32) before Hitler’s 1933 speech. As for the Ledwinka concepts in question, they had to do with engine design and were pretty far removed from the basic concept of a people’s car. In any case, Ledwinka and Porsche were both addressing issues popularized by Ganz long before Hitler came to power.

Porsche, like most clever people, was a sponge. As musicians say, artists steal and hacks copy.

That’s not the same as stealing the design, although it could lead to patent infringment on certain details.

Most inventors would consider infringing on their patents to be the equivalent of theft. Ledwinka and Tatra certainly considered Porsche/VW to have stolen their ideas. Their litigation survived the Third Reich and wasn’t settled till 1961.

Throughout the history of automotive development, designers have looked at what others are doing, using the good ideas, rejecting others. I’ve never heard of this refered to as “stealing a design”.

The great Colin Chapman is credited with designing the “Chapman strut” rear suspension, but everybody who knows about Lotus knows he just took a Macpherson strut design and moved it to the back of the car.

and throwing in the Nazi/Jew angle is deplorable.

How is it deplorable? Did Porsche not work for the Nazis? Was Ganz not a Jew?

I’m not responsible for the headline – that’s an editorial decision. The article specifically downplayed Ganz’ Jewish heritage. I only mentioned it in the article once, in connection with his arrest by the Gestapo. Should I have not mentioned the fact that Ganz was Jewish? Maybe it’s lazy writing but I think it would have been negligent to not mention it in light of how closely linked Hitler and the Volkswagen were/are.

The only other references to Ganz being a Jew were a direct quote from Paul Schilperoord explaining his reasons for writing the book, and a citation of the book’s title, which refers to Ganz as a “Jewish genius”.

Why is it “deplorable” for me to mention the fact that Ganz was a Jew? It’s a historical fact. The historical truth is that the Nazis tried to rewrite erasing automotive history, erasing the role that Jews played in the development of the automobile. Before WWII, Friedrich Markus, not Benz and Daimler, was acknowledged by Austrians as the father of the automobile. Markus was the first person to use a gasoline powered engine to drive a four wheel vehicle. That was in 1870, almost two decades before Benz’ and Daimler’s motor cars. To be sure, Markus’ vehicle was not a practical automobile, and it’s not clear if he ever ran his second, greatly improved, car that he built contemporaneously with Benz’ and Daimler’s work, but before the Nazis took over Austria, Markus’ role in the development of the automobile was well known, along with his invention of magneto ignition and a carburettor.

There was at least one statue of Markus in Vienna and the technical university in Vienna had a memorial plaque to Markus at its entrance. Both memorials to Markus were destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 when Germany annexed Austria.

Schilperoord is only trying to restore automotive pioneers like Ganz and Markus to their rightful role in automotive history.

Methinks thou dost try to defend the honor of someone who served the Nazis just a bit too much.