The first car Ferdinand Porsche designed ran on electricity, and he engraved every one of its main components with the same two characters: P1. In September 1899 it won a 40-kilometre race in Berlin by 18 minutes, with three passengers on board. In 1902 it was put away in an Austrian warehouse, and nobody touched it again for 112 years. It stands at the top of the escalator in the Porsche Museum, unrestored, the first car a visitor meets.
Below it, in the white hall that seems to float above a square in Zuffenhausen, the stories continue. A racing car spent decades wearing another car’s identity. A Paris–Dakar car came back to life with the desert’s sand inside it, and the museum chose to keep its scars. A Le Mans winner and a record car were driven to the museum’s door on public roads. A barn find arrived with its engine seized and both front wings missing. And many of the cars on show are only between engagements, because this is a museum whose collection is meant to be driven.
In Brief
- The museum opened to the public on 31 January 2009, in a building by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects of Vienna, with exhibition design by HG Merz
- Its exhibition hall of 5,600 square metres rests on three supports and spans up to 60 metres
- Around 80 vehicles are on show at a time, drawn from a collection of about 800
- Every year, more than 750 vehicles from the collection travel to more than 300 events in over 30 countries
- The museum’s workshop works in full view, behind a glass wall in the foyer
- In 2023 the museum received 535,613 visitors, the highest number in its history at the time
History
From 1976, Porsche showed some 20 of its cars in a former engine hall on the works site in Zuffenhausen, rotating them so that the rest of the collection could take its turn. It was a works museum in the plainest sense. Its successor began with a competition: 170 European practices applied, and on 31 January 2005 a jury chose the design of Delugan Meissl Associated Architects of Vienna.
Building began in October 2005. On 13 November 2007, the steel structure of the exhibition hall was lowered onto its supports, and on 3 November 2008 the first 12 cars were rolled in: among them a 356 Cabriolet, an original 911 and the first prototype of the 924. The museum opened to the public on 31 January 2009. Five years later to the day, it unveiled the P1 there for the first time.
The building is a feat of the kind its exhibits would recognise. The whole weighs about 35,000 tonnes, and the exhibition hall, 140 metres long and 70 wide, rests on three supports, spanning a void of up to 60 metres and rising as much as 10 metres above the ground. Its underside is clad in reflective panels which, in the architects’ words, “absorb the architectural landscape below”: the square, and everyone crossing it, is reflected overhead before a single car comes into view. The façade is made of some 30,000 lozenge-shaped panels, and the main glass front, 23 metres high, faces north.
The Collection
The P1 deserves a second look. Its octagonal electric motor produced 3 PS, 5 on overload; a 12-step controller governed it; and its range was up to 80 kilometres. In the Berlin race of 1899, more than half of the field failed to finish, and the P1 used the least energy of any car in the town-traffic trial. Nearby stands the Semper Vivus, which Porsche calls the world’s first full hybrid. That car is a recreation, built from contemporary documents and drawings, because the original is lost.
The car Porsche calls No. 1 is younger by half a century. The 356 “No. 1” Roadster received its operating permit on 8 June 1948 in Gmünd, in Austria: an aluminium body on a tubular steel frame, a 35 PS flat-four of 1,131 cc derived from Volkswagen and mounted ahead of the rear axle, and a top speed of 135 km/h. It was a one-off, and it was sold. A Zurich buyer paid 7,500 Swiss francs for it, and a later owner fitted a 1.5-litre engine, wider wheel arches and round tail lights. In 1958 Porsche brought its first car home, trading a new 356 Speedster for it.
The first 917 has a stranger biography. Chassis 917-001 was the car shown at Geneva in March 1969. In September 1970 it was rebuilt as a short-tail and painted in the colours of the car that had won Le Mans that June, number 23 included, and in that borrowed identity it became a fixture of the collection. The real winner had its own story: Hans Herrmann and Richard Attwood covered 4,607.811 kilometres in the rain, and Attwood drove with mumps without knowing it, able to drink nothing but milk. In 2019, after more than a year of work, 917-001 was returned to the white and green it wore at Geneva. It took half a century to become itself again.
The 935/78 is known to everyone as “Moby Dick”, and the car in the museum is the car that raced. It produced 845 PS and was the first racing car with water-cooled cylinder heads. It reached 366 km/h on the Hunaudières straight at Le Mans, won the Silverstone 6 Hours by seven laps, and came home eighth at Le Mans after a misfire and an oil leak. After two more races, it went to the museum.
The 956 won Le Mans at its first attempt, in 1982, taking all three places on the podium. A year later, in a 956, Stefan Bellof lapped the Nordschleife in 6:11.13, and his manager said there must be something wrong with the clock. The clock was right, and the record stood for 35 years, until the 919 Hybrid Evo went round in 5:19.55 on 29 June 2018, 51.58 seconds quicker. That October, Mark Webber and Marc Lieb drove the Evo and the 919 that had won Le Mans in 2016 for 25 kilometres on public roads, from number 911 Porschestraße to number 1 Porscheplatz, and handed them to the museum.
The museum holds all three 959s that finished the Paris–Dakar of 1986: the winner, the car of Jacky Ickx and Claude Brasseur that came second, and the service car that came sixth. The winner is kept as found, in what Porsche calls a time capsule. When the Ickx car was recommissioned, the mechanics found sand and mud from the desert inside it. They conserved the corrosion rather than repair it, and left the crew’s cable ties in place.
The most human story belongs to a car nobody was looking for. On 5 August 2014, a television channel rang the museum about an early 911 in a barn in Brandenburg. It was number 57, with both front wings missing and its engine and brakes seized. Porsche paid 107,000 euros for it, and 14,500 more for a gold 911 L of 1968 bought alongside it. The 911 was restored by the autumn of 2017. The gold car, by the museum’s choice, has not been washed.
Most car museums keep their collections still. This one sends them out. Every year, more than 750 vehicles leave for some 300 events in more than 30 countries, to the Mille Miglia and the Targa Florio, to Le Mans Classic, the Historic Grand Prix of Monaco and Goodwood. It is a museum in the old sense and a racing team in the new, and the hall is never quite the same twice.
It is also candid. The P1 is shown as it was found, and a gold 911 L is kept unwashed as living history. The 911 GT1 ’98 on show is described as the Zakspeed car from the FIA GT Championship, not the Le Mans winner. The opening chapter does not pass over the 1940s either: one station is given to the forced labourers in Stuttgart in those years. A company museum that tells its own history this plainly earns the trust it asks for.
And the public has answered. More than 5.8 million people had visited by January 2024, and the six millionth arrived that May.
Visitor Experience
The approach is the first exhibit. The hall hangs above the square on its three supports, and walking beneath it, under the mirrored soffit, is like standing under the hull of a ship in dry dock. Inside the foyer, before the escalator, a glass wall gives on to the museum’s workshop, where specialists prepare the cars that leave and repair the ones that return. The car on the lift may be at Goodwood next month.
Then the long escalator rises into the white hall, and the P1 waits at the top. From there, the visit offers a choice: the years before 1948, or the chronology of the sports cars from the first 356 onwards. In the open hall, the eye travels from one decade to the next. We would begin with the years before 1948: the sports cars mean more once you have met the P1.
The collection is always on the move, and the museum mounts two special exhibitions a year, so a second visit is rarely a repetition. On weekdays, tours booked in advance lead from the museum into the works, where visitors follow the cars down the production line. For an enthusiast, the museum and the works together are the better part of a day.
Climate
| Month | High °C | Low °C | Rainfall mm | Rainy days | Daylight h |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 4° | −2° | 73 | 14 | 8.8 |
| February | 6° | −2° | 62 | 12 | 10.2 |
| March | 10° | 1° | 74 | 14 | 11.9 |
| April | 14° | 4° | 60 | 13 | 13.7 |
| May | 18° | 9° | 90 | 15 | 15.3 |
| June | 22° | 12° | 81 | 14 | 16.1 |
| July | 24° | 14° | 86 | 14 | 15.7 |
| August | 24° | 14° | 75 | 13 | 14.3 |
| September | 19° | 10° | 68 | 12 | 12.6 |
| October | 14° | 7° | 73 | 13 | 10.8 |
| November | 9° | 2° | 73 | 13 | 9.2 |
| December | 5° | −1° | 82 | 15 | 8.3 |
Monthly averages for Porsche Museum, 1991–2020.
Generated using Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026 (CC BY 4.0).
Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data it contains.
Location
The museum stands on Porscheplatz in Zuffenhausen, in the north of Stuttgart, beside the works where the company has built its cars since 1950. Werk 1, the three-storey brick building it moved into in June 1938, shares the square, and in the middle of the roundabout Gerry Judah’s “Inspiration 911” lifts three real 911s into the sky on white steel pillars, the highest 24 metres up. The city centre lies about nine kilometres to the south by road, Ludwigsburg some ten kilometres to the north. From the A81, the Zuffenhausen exit and a short run along the B10 lead to the square; from the centre, the B27 does. The S6 line of the S-Bahn stops at Neuwirtshaus (Porscheplatz), at the museum’s door, and the building has its own underground car park.
Nine kilometres across the city, in Bad Cannstatt, stands the Mercedes-Benz Museum. Ferdinand Porsche was technical director at Daimler from 1923 to 1928, and the two museums make a natural pair for a day in Stuttgart. Some ten kilometres to the west, the roads around Schloss Solitude once formed an 11.4-kilometre racing circuit, used until 1965; Dan Gurney won there in a Porsche 804 in 1962. The roads are public, and a lap at the legal limit is open to anyone with a car and a sense of history. Ten kilometres to the north, the baroque Residential Palace of Ludwigsburg offers a collection of another kind.
Address
1 Porscheplatz
70435 Stuttgart
Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg
Germany
Website