Porsche-Diesel

The history of Porsche-Diesel

The man who designed the Beetle wanted a people's tractor to go with it, and it took three decades and two other companies to build one.

Ferdinand Porsche worked across every kind of mechanical transport rather than specialising. His first large success was in 1900, when the petrol-electric carriage he designed for Lohner of Vienna — he was 25 — was the sensation of the Paris World Exhibition. The racing cars came from the same hand as the popular ones: the Austro-Daimler, the Mercedes SSK, the sixteen-cylinder Auto Union, and the Volkswagen.

The tractor followed the same logic as the car. If a Volkswagen was not to be only for the wealthy, a Volksschlepper should be available to everyone: simple, robust and reliable enough to replace the horse and the ox. Porsche had been at it since 1915, when he worked at Austro-Daimler on a ploughing tractor and on the Landwehr-Train, a petrol-engined hauler pulling electrically driven trailers. Prototypes of the Volksschlepper proper were built from 1937, as a parallel to the Volkswagen works, until the war forced the plans for the tractor factory at Waldbröl near Cologne to be abandoned in 1941. An Ostradschlepper followed in 1942, on enormous wheels, for the marshland of the eastern front.

It was rebuilt after the war from what was left. In 1946 Karl Rabe, Porsche's chief designer of many years, put together a 20 hp petrol tractor at Gmünd in Carinthia from the surviving parts and the accumulated experience. It was tested at length in Brazil, at the state research station at Ipanema, and the results produced a thorough redesign: the Type 313 diesel, a two-cylinder air-cooled four-stroke giving 17 hp continuous, with a power take-off, belt pulley, mower drive, hitch and an implement lift. The machines were shown at the industrial fair in Klagenfurt, where the source judges them a very considerable step forward in tractor design — but under the difficult conditions of the time it was impossible to set up a tractor works in Austria. Austrian-built Porsche tractors did follow, though under licence and by another firm: Hofherr-Schrantz built them on an Allgaier licence, and the Austro Junior is a Porsche Junior with its engine power reduced.

Production happened in Swabia instead. Allgaier of Uhingen took a licence on the Type 313, and the first Allgaier “System Porsche”, the AP 17, reached the market in 1950 — air-cooled, light, with an oil-hydraulic clutch, at 4,450 marks. The order books filled. A second plant went up at Friedrichshafen-Manzell on Lake Constance, on ground with its own history: Count Zeppelin's first airship rose from it around 1900, and the twelve-engined Do X flying boat began its test flights there in 1930.

Ferdinand Porsche turned 75 on 3 September 1950 and died the following January, having seen the AP 17 succeed.

The range that followed, the A111 to A144, held Allgaier at the top of the German tractor market from 1953 into the middle of the decade, and it was built as a kit of parts: an 11 hp single cylinder at the bottom, each larger type adding a cylinder with the same pistons, connecting rods and valve gear. Around 80% of the components interchange between models; only the gearboxes, axles and steering differ. More than 25,000 were built before tractor production at Uhingen stopped at the end of 1955.

In 1956 the business became Porsche-Diesel-Motorenbau at Friedrichshafen, part of Mannesmann, working closely with the design office at Zuffenhausen. The tractors took their names from the sports cars — Junior, Standard, Super, Master — and were painted red. In 1959 and 1960 they stood second in the German registration figures. About 120,000 were built in eight years, and in 1963 Porsche-Diesel stopped making tractors.

Written from Traktorenlexikon: Porsche-Diesel, Wikibooks, CC BY-SA 4.0 · retrieved 2026-09-14. Our words, not the source's.