Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen: sixty-years producing Porsches

The Zuffenhausen plant, in Stuttgart, central core of Porsche AG is celebrating seventy years of Porsche cars production. For more than seven decades it has been the home address of Porsche and since 1950 more than one million sports cars of the German brand were produced in the facilities that have grown as time went by.

Porsche moved to the District of Zuffenhausen back in June 1938 and since the beginning it started to be the place where important chapters in the history of the automobile were written. At Zuffenhausen the first series of the car that would become the Volkswagen Beetle was built in 1938 and it also saw the birth of Type 64, a model that would become the inspiration for many of Porsche’s models.

On 6 of April 1950, Zuffenhausen completed its first Type 356 and marketed the beginning of the plant expansion in the following years. In 1952, the buildings forming Porsche Plant 2 designed by the well-known architect Rolf Gutbrod were completed. Production continued to grow and in 1956 the 10.000th Porsche 356 left Zuffenhausen. 1960 saw the conclusion of the construction of Plant 3 that also housed the Sales and Customer Service Departments.

Today the Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen is divided in Bodyshop, Paint shop, Vehicle Assembly, Upholstery, Engine Assembly and Test Dynamometers. Porsche has developed solutions such as multi-floor production in the Bodyshop and Vehicle Assembly to guarantee flexible production in a limited area. Zuffenhausen is continuing to grow with the new Paint shop that is being built on the former premises of Dürr AG purchased by Porsche in spring 2008.

To mark the sixty-years of production in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen, the Porsche Museum will be showing from 20 March to 9 May 2010 a special exhibition: with the beginnings and the ongoing development of production at Zuffenhausen being presented by a series of photos and the first Porsche 356 Coupé built in the plant shown for the first time in the Museum.