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    "headline": "Ferdinand Porsche built the first hybrid car in 1900, a Lohner-Porsche with motors in all four wheel hubs",
    "description": "Ferdinand Porsche's Lohner-Porsche, shown in Paris in 1900, used a gasoline engine to power hub motors in all four wheels, making it the first hybrid car.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-15T01:00:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Ferdinand Porsche, Hybrid vehicles, Jacob Lohner, Lohner-Porsche, Vienna",
    "articleBody": "More than a century before hybrids became a common sight on highways, a 25-year-old Ferdinand Porsche built one. His Lohner-Porsche “Mixte” used a gasoline engine to drive four electric motors, one tucked inside each wheel hub, and it is credited as the first hybrid electric vehicle. The design also gave the world the first commercial car with hub motors. Yet most drivers who know the Porsche name have never heard of it. From battery car to gasoline-electric hybrid Porsche’s first Lohner prototypes were battery-powered, front-wheel-drive cars with a hub motor in each front wheel. Each motor produced 2.5 to 3.5 horsepower and could peak at 7 for short bursts. Because the motors turned the wheels directly, there was very little friction lost in the drivetrain. The 1898 “System Lohner-Porsche” caused a stir across Europe. The leap to a hybrid came from a customer. E.W. Hart, a coachbuilder from Luton in England, wanted a car that could run on petrol as well as electricity, seat four and drive all four wheels. The result was nicknamed La Toujours Contente, French for “always satisfied,” a dig at Camille Jenatzy’s record-setting electric car La Jamais Contente. It went on show at the Paris Exhibition in December 1900. The numbers behind a four-ton pioneer Batteries: 1.8 tonnes, a 44-cell, 80-volt lead-acid pack of about 270 amp-hours, hung on springs to protect the cells. Motors: four hub motors weighing 1,280 pounds together. Total weight: more than four tonnes, on pneumatic tires. Output: 56 horsepower, with four forward speeds. Price: 15,000 Austrian crowns. Hart liked it enough to buy a second, two-wheel-drive car for 7,950. Put those figures side by side and the problem is plain: the battery pack alone made up roughly 45 percent of the whole machine. That weight hurt it in competition. In a British electric vehicle endurance trial from November 6 to 9, 1900, the four-wheel-drive Lohner-Porsche covered 34 miles with Porsche at the wheel before tire failures ended its run, and Porsche came down with a severe cold. A lighter rival won after a 59-mile first run. Before the hybrid: a self-taught engineer Porsche grew up the son of a panel-beater and was fascinated by electricity from childhood. He took night classes at the Imperial Polytechnical College in Reichenberg, now Liberec, while working in his father’s shop by day. At 18, in 1893, he moved to Vienna to work for the Béla Egger electrical company and sat in on classes at what is now the Vienna University of Technology whenever work allowed. He never finished a formal engineering degree. At Egger he built the company’s first electric wheel-hub motor, based on a concept by American inventor Wellington Adams, and raced it in 1897. Coachbuilder Jacob Lohner then hired him, at 23, to design an electric drive for his carriages. What happened next The hybrid was too expensive for ordinary buyers, so Lohner put the drivetrain into bigger commercial vehicles: double-decker buses for Berlin and fire engines for Vienna, Frankfurt and London. Vienna’s fire department ran 40 vehicles built on the Lohner-Porsche principle. More than 300 Lohner-Porsche vehicles were sold by 1906, the year Porsche left to become chief designer at Austro-Daimler. Lohner predicted: “You will hear of him again.” The idea also had a long afterlife. Boeing and NASA studied the design when building the Apollo program’s Lunar Roving Vehicle, and the series hybrid concept still underpins many railway locomotives. For more on alternative fuels in car history, read about Brazil’s ethanol-only cars of the 1980s and how Porsche assembled the Mercedes 500 E during a lean decade. Further reading Wikipedia: Lohner-Porsche Image: Unknown author, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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