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The first Porsche: electric, front-wheel drive and rear-axle steering

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Created on January 5, 2026

Text:

Gerhard Schütz

Photos:

Archiv Gerhard Schütz

12

Archiv Gerhard Schütz

12

All-wheel hypercar. The sprung battery suspension is clearly visible

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Lohner-Porsche Model 27 (1900) with two wheel hub motors at the front. The baroque, shell-shaped front cover is elegant

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Egger-Lohner C2 Phaeton (1898)

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Lohner-Porsche Model 27 (1900) at the World Exhibition in Paris 1900

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Wheel hub motor from Deepdrive tested on a modified Tesla, 2025

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Wheel hub motor: Patent drawing by Ferdinand Porsche

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The Bergrennwagen

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The designer rides here: Ferdinand Porsche on a "Mixte" at the Exelbergrennen

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Hybrid type "Mixte" with large generator at the engine output

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Hybrid in the Austro-Daimler. Engines on the rear axle

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Hybrid technology: "Semper vivus" - always alive

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Lohner-Porsche Model 27 (1900)

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Summary

In 2025, 125 years after the presentation of the first electric car with wheel hub motors, the start-up Deepdrive announced that the large-scale use of this technology was within reach. Time to look back at the exciting early history of the wheel hub motor.

This article contains the following chapters

Ferdinand Porsche, also the inventor of the e-bike
Egger-Lohner C2 Phaeton
The wheel hub drive
Records and motorsport
Hybrid technology: "Semper vivus"
The hybrid "Mixte"
Cooperation with Austro-Daimler
Epilogue

Estimated reading time: 10min

Preview (beginning of the article)

April Fool's joke? AI fake? No, fact! Ok - the car wasn't called Porsche, but Lohner, but Ferdinand Porsche had designed it. Lohner? Lohner was a Viennese carriage manufacturer who wanted to enter the automobile business in the 1890s. Initial experiments with combustion engines had been unsatisfactory. And Lohner realized that such cars were met with rejection, even hostility, by the public in many places. Lohner himself was concerned that "the air would be spoiled by the large number of petrol engines." The quiet and odorless electric drive seemed to him to be the more promising solution in this respect too, and so he switched to electric drive in 1897. In those years, it was by no means clear which drive technology would win the race - or whether only one solution would ultimately dominate. Exciting times of technological openness. In view of our ideologized present, we wish those times would come back.

Welcome to Zwischengas!

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