Porsche Factory Tour - Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen

My boyfriend, Laurent is crazy for Porsche. So for his 30th birthday I decided to take him for a „Porsche-weekend”. I booked a tour in the Zuffenhausen factory, and we visited the museum, too. He is sharing his experiences with us now.

My passion for the Porsche brand came from the video game: Need for Speed: Porsche 2000. I was playing a lot this game when I was a child and I learned by heart all the different Porsche models thanks to the game.

In some way this passion for Porsche pushed me to interest me to the German culture, to learn German language and to move to Germany! I don’t regret it now as Germany is very nice. J The first thing I wanted to do in Germany was to go to Stuttgart for a Porsche pilgrimage.

I was impressed where we arrived in Zuffenhausen because the full area is Porsche: the roundabout is a big Porsche sculpture, there is a nice concession, the modern museum, the huge factory and even many cars crossing the roundabout are Porsche! Like a dream in Porsche world! J

Porsche has only 2 factories in the world: one in Stuttgart and one in Leipzig. The Stuttgart factory is the historic one where the Boxster, the Cayman, the 911 and the very new 100% electric car Taycan are made.

The factory in Leipzig was built only in 1999 to assemble the newer and bigger „5 doors” models which are the Cayenne, the Macan and the Panamera. Those are still very luxurious cars but a bit less sporty in my opinion.

Stuttgart is really the capital of Porsche as most of the cars have been made here and even the logo of the brand is containing the logo of the city of Stuttgart and a big part of the Württemberg logo.

Unfortunately we couldn’t visit the welding department as a secret prototype was being made there. It is a shame as I think it should be the more impressive part of the factory as most of the robots are there.

So we started the visit with the engine assembly, all the needed spare parts are brought to the workers by automatic small vehicles. Some are guided by a black line on the floor and some more modern are guided by magnets incrusted into the floor. The factory has a lot of robots but most of the robots are only helping the workers to bring parts or do quality checks. Most of the assembly work is hand made by high skilled mechanics. Porsche has his own school in Stuttgart where they are training their engineers, it is very hard to get in as they only take the best but then as an employee you have 20% discount on any new Porsche. But the least expensive Porsche costs around 55 000 Euros so you still have to save money first. J

We also visited the leather department: they use the full and new leather (so 1 full cow skin) and a worker is marking the exact shape and all the imperfections with a computer mouse. Then a computer is taking a picture of the whole skin and automatically arranges all the parts to be cut in this skin. Then a state of the art machine cuts very quickly the leather parts thanks to a very high pressure water jet. The rest of the leather is then sold to manufacture wallets, belt and other smaller products.

The factory was very clean and big, there were also a very new building where the new electric model Taycan was going to be produced but we couldn’t enter it as this new model was not yet released.

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It was very nice but now I really want to visit the factory in Leipzig too as I think it will be more modern and I know there is a circuit next to the factory.

The museum was very nice too and I really appreciated the fact we could actually sit in some cars. Only the shop was disappointing as I found it pretty small but I have to admit I was somehow expecting to see a huge shop.

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