Ferdinand Porsche’s use of in-wheel electric motors in some of his earliest automobiles, including the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus, the first hybrid vehicle, established him as an innovator and an engineering genius and certainly helped launch his career in automobile design and construction. He can’t claim to have invented the in-wheel electric motor, however; that credit should instead go to one of several inventors, including a fellow countryman of Porsche’s who went on to display his own engineering prowess on this side of the Atlantic.
Like Porsche and distant relative Hans Ledwinka, Joseph Ledwinka was born in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, specifically Vienna, but unlike the other two men, Joseph Ledwinka emigrated to America in 1896 to work for the Chicago Coach and Carriage Company, likely as a draftsman or engineer. Ledwinka would eventually become an automobile engineering juggernaut in his own right; in the 1920s and 1930s, through his association with Budd, he would go on to file patents for dozens, if not hundreds, of methods of body construction and contribute to the development of all-steel automobile bodies and unit-body structures.
- See more at: http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2014/02/12/ferdinand-porsche-joseph-ledwinka-and-the-invention-of-the-electric-hub-motor/#sthash.YHR6jp8i.dpuf