What Is the Horse on the Porsche Logo?

The horse is a historical pun that is also literally true. Stuttgart grew from a stud farm founded around the year 950, and the name comes from the Old High German word for a stud farm. A rearing horse has been on the city's arms for centuries, and the archive's 1938 file shows exactly that: a yellow shield with a black horse.

Ferdinand Porsche founded his design firm in Stuttgart in 1931, so when the company later needed a badge, its home town was a natural source. The firm built no cars under its own name at first. The first one, the 356, was road-certified in Austria in 1948, and the photo above shows the No. 1 roadster. It carried no crest, which is why the badge belongs to the early 1950s rather than to the 1930s.

Wikipedia's article on the New York importer Max Hoffman states that Ferry Porsche designed the emblem at Hoffman's urging. Hoffman sold much of Porsche's early output in the United States and is said to have wanted a badge that stood out. The crest itself borrows existing heraldry, so no single artist invented its parts, and accounts of who drew the final artwork differ.

The archive's 1948 file is a plain quartered Württemberg shield with no horse and no name. Four years later, in 1952, the Stuttgart horse sits inside it with PORSCHE across the top for the first time. That layout is still used today.

Real heraldry never spells out the bearer's name, and the Porsche crest does, across the top. That is why Wikipedia notes it is not a conventional coat of arms. It is a company badge that uses two real ones as ingredients.

The structure has not changed since the early 1950s. The 1963 version gained a dimensional gold finish, and the 2014 redraw made the gold brighter and the detail flatter for screens, but the horse, antlers, bands and lettering stayed. The horse theme also shows up in names: the Taycan is described as meaning leaping horse, which reads as a nod to the crest.