Welcome by Professor Dr.Ing. Ernst Fuhrmann, Chairman of the Board of Dr.Ing.h.c.F. Porsche AG on the visit of King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden on March 23, 1979 to the Porsche Development Center in Weissach

Majesty,
dear Prime Minister,
Excellencies,
dear guests,
dear representatives of the press.

It is an honor and a pleasure for us to be able to welcome your Majesty and your delegation here. It is, of course, also a particular pleasure for us that our Prime Minister visits us for the first time on this occasion.

With an annual production of around 35,000 sports cars, Porsche is a very small automobile factory. Nevertheless, we have set ourselves ambitious goals. We don't just want to build good cars, we want to protect the automobile from becoming an impersonal commodity such as a refrigerator. Rather, we want it to have that character that has always fascinated people, namely that the car obeys the driver strictly and is connected to him like a loyal friend. This is how we at Porsche understand the sporty car and we want to continue to maintain it despite many difficulties.

With our special products, we have to comply with the requirements and laws of our time in the same way as any mass-produced automobile and consider it a particular challenge to comply with safety issues, fuel consumption, noise laws and emission limits, even with a high-performance sports car.

We believe that this generation of sports cars will once again set the pace for the next generation of automobiles, just like the sports cars of the past few years, whose specific construction principles such as lightweight construction, streamlined shape and active safety are used everywhere today.

King Carl-Gustaf visits Porsche

Porsche has been "purveyor to the court" for decades - Sweden was one of the first importers of Porsche sports cars.

On Friday, March 23, King Carl-Gustaf of Sweden will be the Porsche on his state visit to the Federal Republic of Germany A visit to the Weissach development center, King Carl-Gustaf wants to find out about the current status and future trends in vehicle technology. Like several members of the Swedish royal family, he is an enthusiastic Porsche driver and very interested in all questions relating to automotive technology.

King Carl-Gustaf has been driving his second Porsche since 1974, a 911 S Targa in blue metallic paint. The king's joy in sporty automobiles was probably influenced not least by his uncle Prince Bertil. He is known in Sweden as the "engine prince" and has been a Porsche driver for more than 20 years. Prince Bertil is currently driving a blue Carrera RS. However, the contact between Porsche and the Swedish court dates back to the early 1950s. At that time, Prince Wihelm (Carl-Gustaf's great uncle, who died in 1965), drove his first Porsche 356.

30 years ago: Most of the original Porsches left for Sweden.

The first of the 52 Porsche 356s manufactured in Gmund in Austria was registered in Switzerland. But the first major buyer of Porsche sports cars was the Kingdom of Sweden: half of all Austrian production in 1949 was delivered there.

Porsche reached its peak on the Swedish market in the sixties, when more than 200 sports cars were newly registered from Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen. Until 1978, the constant revaluation of the Deutsche Mark for Porsche caused registrations to drop to 104 units per year, but for 1979 an increase of at least ten percent is expected again. In the 30 years from 1949 to 1978, Porsche exported a total of 3,118 sports cars to Sweden.