From Ars Technica:
Check out the first-ever electric car designed by Porsche, the 1898 P1
Before Ferdinand Porsche invented the world's first hybrid, he built a BEV.
With the Porsche Taycan finally making its way to customers, we thought it would be worth looking back and remembering Porsche's first battery-electric car. In this case, that means all the way back to 1898 and the Egger-Lohner electric vehicle, C.2 Phaeton model. Thankfully, Mr. Porsche himself referred to the car simply as the P1.
As a young man, Ferdinand Porsche was fascinated by electricity and chose not to follow in the footsteps of his small-town tinsmith father. In 1893, he moved to Vienna at the age of 18 to begin an apprenticeship at electrical firm Bela Egger & Co. while simultaneously enrolling as a student at the Imperial Technical University in Reichenberg.
This ambition and hard work paid off, as he was given a management position at Egger & Co. within just a few years of starting as an apprentice. 1897 was a milestone year for Mr. Porsche: now the head of the company's testing department, he built an electric wheel-hub motor, he met with carriage manufacturer Jacob Lohner & Co., and he began working on an electric car. Ferdinand Porsche was still just 22 years old.
As a collaboration between electrical firm Bela Egger & Co. and Jacob Lohner & Co., the Egger-Lohner electric vehicle, the C.2 Phaeton model, was a novel merging of two worlds into the newly created world of automobiles. The Lohner firm thought that electric cars would be particularly marketable given their lack of noise and exhaust fumes. They commissioned Porsche to design and create the electric drivetrain while they handled the chassis and body work.....MUCH MORE
The very first Porsche car?
The result, which debuted on the streets of Vienna on June 26, 1898, was the P1. It is prescient that Porsche had the confidence and ambition to nickname the car the P1, trusting in himself that there would be more Porsche cars to come. It was Porsche's first car, and it was also among the first vehicles registered in Austria when it debuted on the streets of Vienna on June 26, 1898.
The P1 itself was quite a machine—for the time and for today as well. Foregoing Porsche's new wheel-hub motor, the P1 employed a rear-mounted drive unit. That's right, the first car that Porsche designed and built had its motor in the back! Mr. Porsche's "octagonal electric motor"—so named because of its housing shape—weighed in at 287lbs (130kg) and produced a bracing 3hp (2.2kW).
With only that single-digit power, 1,100lbs (500kg) of batteries and another 1,897lbs (860kg) of vehicle to move around (that's a total vehicle weight of 2,997lbs/1,359kg for those counting at home), the top speed of the P1 was 21mph (34km/h). However, just like the modern Taycan, the P1 had an "overboost" function that pulled a full 5hp (3.7kW) out of the engine for dealing with steep inclines....
