Thinking Small (21 page)

The price of the car remained a problem as well. The contract with the RDA had stipulated that Porsche’s car should cost 990 marks. Not only was this practically impossible from an engineering point of view, it was also unlikely that even if Porsche could make a car to sell at such a low price, there would be anyone to buy it. At 990 marks, one People’s Car would still equal about 800 working hours for the normal citizen. If one compares those numbers to the Model T, the German citizen would be giving three times the amount of his or her wage to get a People’s Car than the average American had given to pay for theirs. The impossibility of it all didn’t seem to matter, though; Porsche’s obsession pushed like a steam engine through anything that got in its way.

Even after the RDA signed their contract with Porsche, Heinrich Nordhoff and the others at Opel persisted in making their own small car, increasingly distancing themselves from the other auto companies that made up the RDA. They would eventually create a model called the P4, which could run at 200 RM and be sold at the price of 1,450 RM. That meant the price was 50 RM less than the one Porsche originally proposed in his Exposé, and Opel had the facilities for it to be mass produced. This Opel car was still a scaled-down version of a luxury car, but it was the most impressive effort toward a Volkswagen that anyone had come up with yet. Hitler did not appreciate Opel’s attempt.
Bringing his fist down hard against the table in front of him at another Berlin Auto Show, Hitler would tell them: “Gentleman! There can be only one Volkswagen
³
, not ten!” And that meant
his
Volkswagen, the one being designed by Porsche. Opel would have to give up its idea of the small car. The P4 would never be produced.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen men worked together in Porsche’s small garage, laboring day after day on the first three Volkswagen cars. They changed the engine type numerous times, going from a two-cylinder, two-cycle, water-cooled engine to an air-cooled, four-cycle, two-cylinder engine. The first did poorly when tested over long distances; the latter didn’t have adequate power in the lower ranges. They tried all sorts of bodies: The three early cars were made of different materials—one wood, one a thin metal, and finally one that was all steel. Eighteen months after signing the contract with the RDA, Porsche had a drivable handmade prototype ready to show, and Porsche and his team took the car to Munich to let Hitler have a look. Hitler was deeply impressed and told Porsche that it was an amazing piece of work. The RDA men were furious that they were neither informed nor invited when Porsche showed Hitler the cars.

A full year of tests now commenced. Porsche and his engineers drove the V3 all over Germany, day and night, in inclement weather and in sun. (A little explanation about the term “V3”: “V” stands for
Versuch,
which means something like
test model
in this context. There had been
one
car that was the V1 model and
one
car that was the V2 model, but because the V3 model showed the most promise,
three
V3 models were eventually tested, the third, fourth, and fifth prototypes ever made.)

The cars were always kept outside in the cold air rather than in garages so their start-up could be tested in all kinds of humidity and cold. (Most Germans did not have garages, so Hitler wanted the cars to be able to start in even the coldest of weather.) A member of the RDA often rode in the cars during these tests,
taking careful notes. Sometimes the drivers did as much as 500 miles a day. Headlights went out, gearshifts and crankshafts cracked and broke, front wheels wobbled too much, shock absorbers dissolved, the brakes kept giving out. There were crashes with motorcycles and deer; there were times when they could hardly get the cars back home. People worked overnight to repair them just so they could be subjected to ever more testing the next day. The V3 covered over 30,000 miles and kept on going until December 23, 1936, the team trying to get the kinks out before the RDA issued its official report. Exhausted, Porsche and his team rested and relaxed with their families over Christmas into the new year of 1937 and the RDA compiled its report. Porsche wasn’t too worried about the report by that time though. He knew the RDA was losing control. Once again, there was much more going on behind the scenes than most people realized.

In 1936, Hitler had sent his “designer genius” off on his first trip to the United States. Porsche had long wanted to go on such a trip, curious to see the factories and machines of America for himself. Ferdinand could not speak English, and he did not want to be alone for the trip, so he took his nephew Ghislaine with him as translator and secretary. The two men took a boat from Cherbourg and arrived in New York City on October 8, just as the autumn light was hitting the buildings, contrasts of dark and light allowing every angle to stand out against the sky. Porsche bubbled over with observations, bombarding Ghislaine with thoughts to record. His notebooks of those first days are awed sketches of the buildings as they frame the long straight roads, compliments about how nice and patient American drivers are, notes about Radio City Music Hall and the cleanliness and regality of the Hotel Commodore where Porsche and Ghislaine shared a room, and observations about the Roosevelt Raceway out on Long Island. (Porsche had Ghislaine take notes on the cars and the track, and Porsche himself sent a car to win the entire race the next year.)

From New York, Porsche and his nephew took a train to the crown jewel of America’s automotive world, Detroit. Every moment was scheduled to the hilt with tours of the automotive plants, but it was the tour of the Ford plant that mattered most to Porsche. Work on Ford’s River Rouge plant had begun just before 1917 and was completed in 1928. By the time Porsche was to visit, the place had become famous around the world. An issue of
Vanity Fair
from February 1938 gives a good idea of how it was perceived, calling River Rouge “the most significant public monument in America
⁴
, throwing its shadows across the land probably more widely and more intimately than the United States Senate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, [or] the Statue of Liberty.… In a landscape where size, quantity, and speed are the cardinal virtues, it is natural that the largest factory turning out the most cars in the least time should come to have the quality of America’s Mecca toward which the pious journey for prayer.”

Porsche and his team were now making that “religious” journey, and Porsche prepared a list of questions for Ghislaine to ask: How much money did the workers make? What kind of hours did they work? How much vacation time did they get?
How did the people there buy their homes? What was this new idea of credit, or installment plans, that they’d been hearing about? From where did they get their materials and supplies? Did they all have automobiles? What kinds of appliances were popular in their homes? According to Ghislaine’s notes, they were both amazed at how prosperous everyone seemed, and also at how clean they kept the workplaces.

They wanted an American car to take back with them on the ship. At Ford, they tried to buy a car, but the model Porsche requested wasn’t ready and he ended up paying one thousand dollars for a Packard instead. The car was a six-cylinder and he and Ghislaine drove back to New York City in it, stopping in Chicago en route. In his photo album from this trip, which is now in the Porsche archives in Stuttgart, there is one photo Ghislaine snapped of a sign in Chicago that reads: “Some of life’s keenest satisfaction comes from doing things we thought we could not do.”

Their last stop before New York was to take a moment to stand and gaze at Niagara Falls. Porsche felt energized there, standing and looking out at the water, feeling the tickle of mist. It had been a long trip, but he still wasn’t tired. In fact, he was
already pestering Ghislaine to find a way to get him on the
Queen Mary
that was soon to sail out of New York City. At the time, the
Queen Mary
was all the rage; the most modern ship of its time, and Porsche refused to take the ship they’d originally been booked on, once he’d heard the
Queen Mary
set sail that same day. On board, Porsche excitedly toured the ship’s engine room, but the rest of the journey proved more difficult for him. There was a violent storm, and one regal passenger actually jumped to his death. Porsche was distressed by the suicide, and once they reached Britain, he was less enthusiastic about their plans to visit the factories there; after a morose tour through the Austin factory, Ghislaine packed Porsche away on the next train home.