Free Thinking Small by Andrea Hiott

Voiturette, and it had continued at Austro-Daimler in an early attempt called the Maja. But the concept of a car that was not simply small, but could also do everything a larger car could do, only really began to form in his mind in 1921 when he started work on a car called the Sascha at Austro-Daimler. The executives at Austro-Daimler
     had not loved the idea of a Volkswagen—what “common man” can afford a car in these times, they asked—but Porsche was relentless, and eventually a compromise was found. Porsche could try out his new small car design ideas, such as an 1,100-cc engine, but he’d have to do it on a race car, not a car for civilian use. The result was the Sascha.
    There was little about its design, other than its size, that showed signs of the Bug that was to come. When the Sascha debuted in 1922, people were skeptical—it was much smaller and more compact than any car to have ever entered the track—but when it won the entire race for its class, that doubt turned to respect. London’s
Autocar
magazine wrote that the Sascha was a “very positive attraction indeed,” 11 and the
Viennese Motoring Paper
said if there was ever to be a design for a “car of the little man” one day, then surely it would come from something like this. Not only was the car striking to look at—like the body of a butterfly or a dragonfly with invisible wings—but it also was a spectacular achievement of design: It combined the capacity for
     high speeds with the durability of a four-cylinderengine that amazingly had the smallest cubic capacity of any race car of the time. Porsche had made the car smaller by also making the engine smaller, and he’d done so without losing power or thrust, using the swept volume of the engine to its absolute capacity and enlarging the valves. In a sense, such use of the four-cylinder engine was a precursor to the more fuel-efficient cars of today.
    The Sascha, a small, 4-cylinder racing car designed by Porsche. Porsche is standing to the right of the car, the little boy at his side is Ferry. To the left of the car stands its patron, and the man after whom Porsche gave the car its name.
(photo credit 8.2)
    The Sascha was also the first car on which Porsche experimented with materials for the body that were of lighter weight but of higher quality than those found on other cars. These things alongside more technical shifts and changes with carburetion and ignition allowed him to get the tiny car up to nearly 50 bhp (brake horsepower). Even though he’d promised not to make a version of the car to be mass-produced, Porsche did make a version of the Sascha called
     “a touring car” that could have been produced and sold to the public if Austro-Daimler had chosen to do so. But they didn’t. No one was interested. As Porsche’s dream to build the People’s Car became ever more importantto him, he began to realize that following through on it was going to require a fight. He welcomed that struggle, though at the time he could never have imagined just how tough it was going to be for him, or how
     political.

Hitler decided not to kill himself. 1 Instead, he channeled all that despair and anger into blaming the Weimar Republic, the new liberal democracy of Germany, a parliamentary republic established to replace the imperial government that had fallen at the end of the war. Unfortunately, with all the reparations
     and punishment inflicted upon the country by the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar Republic had little chance of making the country happy or of winning its full trust. With more than thirty parties fighting among themselves, the new democracy was an astounding burst of improbability, diversity, creativity, and intelligence; certainly, it appeared extremely chaotic at times. With so many parties, it sometimes felt impossible that any decision could be made. All of this fed perfectly
     into Hitler’s new way of seeing the world: He decided that Germany was being diluted by too many