Foreword by Ferry

[st3ve]

I recently celebrated a birthday and received an old book on Porsche published in 1980 which included the foreword below - presumably written a few years earlier.  I loved the purity of his view of the company, and winced inwardly at some of the "never" and "always" quotes.  I wonder what he would have thought of the shared platform VW meat trucks they now churn out?  🤣   His words are clearly shaped by the energy crisis and has some sort of interesting parallel now with the demise of internal combustion powered cars very much in the near future.
I get that had they remained just a niche producer of idiosyncratic sports cars they would have folded long ago, but I got a nostalgic pang at the thought of the way the company was back then.

[Coastr]

Complete agreement there.  On the VW tie-ups - there was always a degree of platform sharing right from the get-go.  Unpopular opinion but to me the 914/924/944 era actually damaged the company more than it saved it - these were all VW projects that ended up in porsches column and compromised the brand mix.  If the Boxster had come out in the 1970s or 1980s the company could have been more profitable for a longer period and have a richer legacy of previous models.   If they hadn't gone into cayennes & macans it would probably be lotus sized and struggled for years - from an enthusiast point of view, would that be a bad thing?  I love how the elise became a real grandpas axe over the years, almost 911 in it's evolution of the same basic platform for decades.  For whatever reason is morphed from sports car brand to luxury brand, well done for the brand people who made that transition and have printed money ever since.