The last car rolled from the Tatra factory in 1999. What a shame that Ferdinand Piech didn’t buy the company when he went on his famous pan-European brand-buying spree!

So, the much-anticipated Porsche Panamera is upon us. And what an uncomfortable looking creature it is, technically superb I’m sure, but resembling the mongrel offspring of two competing design teams, one tugging and pulling at a 911, and the other squashing and pummeling a Cayenne. Every year-or-so since 1948, when Porsche first started building cars, news of an impending four-door, four-seater has filtered out.

Usually the proposed new ‘limo’ was based on a stretched version of the then current model. Over the decades there have been prototype stretched 356s, stretched 911s and a few independently bodied four-door Porsches. In the late eighties Porsche invested a vast amount of money in the still beautiful 989, a spiritual successor to the front-engine 928, of 1978, but with the looks of a 911. It was embarrassingly abandoned early in the recession-hit nineties. Back then even the most visionary of automotive pundits would have hesitated to predict that when Porsche finally did launch a ‘four-door’ it would be a behemoth of an SUV – or its success!

The 928 was Porsche’s first attempt at a ‘genuine’ four-seater, and revealed the conflict at the heart of the company’s strategy for the future. Intended to replace the ‘dying’ 911, the 928 was not big enough inside to be a truly comfortable four-seater but too big on the outside to be a real sports car  - and it still had only two doors. Plus, of course, for the Porsche-Purist (a sub-species of which I would claim membership) the engine was at the wrong end! Indeed, for some of us the new Panamera also suffers from a misplaced motor, resembling, as a ‘rodder’ would put it, a ‘chopped, channeled and slammed’ Cayenne – at least the Americans will understand it.

Technically the Panamera has everything that Porsche’s R&D can throw at but, for me, what sadly it lacks is that distinctive quality that attracted so many to Porsche in the first place and has ensured that the 911 continues in production – uniqueness in an increasingly homogeneous world. And, what a difference a year makes - the management of Porsche must be trembling at the prospect of launching a luxury saloon into a world that has suddenly performed an economic emergency stop.  

Although Professor Ferdinand Porsche didn’t invent the rear-engine car, his Volkswagen Beetle, and the sports car that evolved from it, are undoubtedly landmarks in the history of the auotomobile.  The world has long-abandoned the over-hung rear-engine but, through sheer tenacity and dedication, generations of engineers at Porsche have honed the 911 into one of the most desirable and arguably the greatest car of all time. At cornering speeds that most owners will rarely experience, or dare to venture, the 911 displays a dynamic quality second to none. There is no reason to believe that Porsche could not apply the same engineering skill to a proper four-door saloon and at the same time retain the unique attraction of the ‘classic’ Porsche, with its unbroken design tradition stretching back to the 1930s. Until only a decade ago, there was a precedent that showed how well it could work, from a company whose own rear-engine tradition also started in the 1930s and ran in parallel with and sometimes crossed that of Porsche – the Czech Tatra.

Tatra was in at the very birth of the motor industry and can lay claim to being the world’s third oldest car manufacturer. The Nesselsdorf Wagon Works, in Moravia, had been manufacturing high quality carriages and railway rolling stock since 1850 and were quick to seize upon the new-fangled horseless carriage as a way of diversifying their business. Commissioned by a local enthusiast, Baron Theodor von Liebieg, the engineers at Nesselsdorf bought a Benz engine and built their first car in 1897. When Czechoslovakia was occupied during the Second World German officers took to the streamlined T87 in a big way and Tatra were allowed to continue car production right through war, as a consequence becoming the only manufacturer to be able to claim one hundred years of continuous car production.

Until post-war Communism smothered progress Tatra was one of the great innovators of the European motor industry. Its chief engineer Hans Ledwinka was considered by the prestigious German magazine Auto Motor und Sport to be the ‘greatest European automotive engineer of his day’ – even ranked ahead of Prof. Ferdinand Porsche, his contemporary and friend. Porsche would become a household name, while destiny decreed that war and political isolation would condemn the other to fade into obscurity.

Hans Ledwinka joined the Nesselsdorf Wagon Works in 1897 and soon demonstrated a precocious engineering talent. He left briefly, came back in 1905, left again to work for Steyr, but continued consulting for the Nesselsdorf concern and finally returned for good to the company, now renamed Tatra, in 1921. One of Ledwinka’s first designs was the T11, an extraordinarily advanced light car which featured an horizontally opposed, twin-cylinder air-cooled engine rigidly mounted to a back-bone chassis with all-round independent suspension. The success of this car and the subsequent four cylinder version, the T12, is credited with inspiring Adolf H to order the building of the Volkswagen and, ultimately, to post-war litigation for patent infringement.  In the 1930s Ledwinka embarked on a remarkable series of streamlined cars that were years ahead of anything else in production. The T77 and T87 were rear-engine V8s, while the similar but smaller T97 was propelled by an overhead-cam 2 Litre flat-four.

All featured striking, dorsal finned, low-drag bodies, scientifically formulated as opposed to the merely fashionable ‘aero’ bodies that many other manufacturers introduced during the ‘streamlined decade’. Post-war, the streamlined theme continued with the marginally more conventional T603, introduced in the mid-fifties.

By the late 1960s the T603 was beginning to show its age and the Tatra designers started work on a replacement. In 1968, for the first time in the company’s history, an outside design house was commissioned to produce a proposal for the bodywork of the new car. Vignale, one of Italy’s most prestigious and prolific Carozzeria, produced an elegantly clean design, in the hard-edged idiom of the day, befitting a machine destined to be an official limousine. A new engine was also in the pipeline, still of course an air-cooled V8 but, at 3.5 litres, much larger than the old 603 unit. The engine boasted four overhead camshafts and was integral with the rear differential, which sat beside the sump with one drive shaft running through it.

The attached gearbox was positioned forward of the axle-line, which had the effect of moving the weight of engine and transmission closer to the centre of the car, improving weight distribution to a favourable 50/50 front-to-rear. Handling was further improved by replacing the traditional Tatra (and Porsche) rear swing axles with semi-trailing arms, with struts at the front. The new car may not have been as distinctive as earlier Tatras but the rear was particularly note-worthy, with buttresses either side of the recessed rear screen extending from the roof to boot/engine-cover. The T613 concealed its engine location so successfully in its ‘three-box’ layout that many non-Czechs on first seeing one fail to realise that it is rear-engined.

The gestation period of the car was slow by Western standards and production did not begin until 1973 but, as was common in communist countries, the absence of commercial competition meant that the T613 stayed in production for over twenty-five years, with only relatively minor cosmetic and mechanical changes. Five variants of the T613 were produced between 1973 and 1995 when the T700, the final manifestation of the T613 lineage, was introduced. The face-lifted, softer, styling of the T700 echoed earlier Tatra motifs but sadly, in the cruelly commercial world into which the Czech Republic found itself pitched in the 1990s, it came too late to save car production.

The last car rolled from the Tatra factory in 1999. What a shame that Ferdinand Piech didn’t buy the company when he went on his famous pan-European brand-buying spree!