Skip to main content

You’ll Have to Pry the Steering Wheel From Porsche’s Cold, Dead Hands

Like BMW, which aims to keep gas-powered M cars in production for as long as humanly possible, Porsche is also making a commitment to motoring purity in the face of new technologies and government overreach. That circular device positioned in front of the driver? Porsche wants to keep it there.

The specter of Big Government and Big Safety conspiring to kill non-autonomous motoring is a real fear, one that’s been talked about more than a little here at TTAC. Call it the Red Barchetta scenario.

Porsche seems aware of it, too, though it tiptoes around the entity at the center of the issue. Nevertheless, the automaker claims a future Porsche “will be one of the last automobiles with a steering wheel.”

That’s the view of Lutz Meschke, vice-president of the company’s executive board and head of finance and IT. In an interview published by the automaker, Meschke lays out the short and medium-term future for both self-driving technology and the steering wheel.

No one knows what the long-term holds, but many of us, Meschke included, seem to believe it’s a future where safety tops personal autonomy. A future where your car drives you, no ifs, ands, or buts.

“A Porsche will always be a car that you will want and be able to drive yourself,” he said, adding much later that the act of driving “will hopefully remain the most important thing at Porsche for a very long time.” Still, Porsche isn’t going the Luddite route when it comes to assist-type features that drivers might want to pay extra for — or demand as standard kit.

porsche-911-gt2-rs-leaked-photos-01

From the parking lot to the racetrack, “We see digitalization and autonomous driving not as a threat but as a tremendous opportunity,” Meschke said. For the former scenario, traffic jam assistants and automated parking systems are seen as the most useful features for the brand. For buyers in Porsche’s price range, these will soon become “must haves,” he said.

Luxury car ownership obviously means the option of taking it as easy as possible. Next year’s Cayenne brings the brand’s most advanced driver’s aids yet, Meschke claims. After that, the Mission E electric sedan (due to appear in 2019) represents the next big leap in autonomous features.

For the weekend racer, automation could mean the ability to navigate a track like your favorite pedal jockey — just download a particular race, recorded by a driver piloting the same car on the same course, and learn from your vehicle. Porsche calls that idea the “Mark-Webber-function,” named after its seasoned brand ambassador.

“With this function, the vehicle could drive autonomously on a racetrack like the Nürnburgring – just like Webber would drive,” said Meschke. “The car drives an ideal course and demonstrates perfect brakes in the curves, where to best shift and where to accelerate. First, software saves the exact course Mark Webber drives on a racetrack. These data are used by the autonomous vehicle to drive the course identically. Afterwards, the customer can reclaim the steering wheel and let the car show him the ideal course, thus training and improving his skills as a driver via direct feedback from the car. This is technically possible already. Of course, the driver can improve over time and learn new things.”

Naturally, other tracks and drivers would be part of such a hypothetical feature. Back in the real world, Porsche plans to make more of its money from digitalization, the less-sexy, once-removed cousin of automation. For example, it already offers German customers the ability to order additional insurance online (“Porsche Shield”) before heading to the track.

In the medium term, Porche hopes to generate a two-digit percentage of its business from digital services. As for the long term, well, that likely involves a rogue Porsche engineer in the last production 911 deftly avoiding Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt road safety drones as he races for the Swiss border.

This article first appeared on thetruthaboutcars.com

The post You’ll Have to Pry the Steering Wheel From Porsche’s Cold, Dead Hands appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex http://ift.tt/2zIKYcP
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Saying Goodbye to the CC V6

For all its size and its global reach, Volkswagen is still, in many ways, a deeply human company. There was, for instance, the Bugatti Veyron an ego project if ever there was one. Then the purchase of Ducati, a move most called folly. And then there was the Phaeton, the Volkswagen that most folks can’t afford. Not only were these moves all strange, I’m sure that they made VW’s accountants furious. None of them made good business sense, but they were all deeply interesting and they all are evidence of the heart that beats at the center of VW. Among these follies is the CC, a car that everyone agrees is rakishly handsome, but that no one really wanted to buy. The car couldn’t last, but the world is brighter for its having been in it. With the approach debut of the Arteon, it seems like a good time to look back on its sadly departing predecessor. The version I drove, because I live in Canada, is a V6 Wolfsburg Edition, which apparently isn’t available in the States. Nor is the V6, not as...
Post a Comment
Read more

T-Prime Makes World Premiere at Beijing

[ See image gallery at www.vwvortex.com ] The SUV segment is one of the fastest growing segments in the world and Volkswagen is showing the world how to do it. With the new T-Prime Concept GTE that was revealed today, the company is showing off all of the technology you can look for in its coming models. The T-Prime is a full-size hybrid SUV that can go up to 31 miles on a charge and gets 87 mpg. The hybrid power station is good for 375 hp and 516 lb/ft of torque and puts the power down with 4MOTION all wheel drive. It’ll get you up to 60 in six seconds. The concept’s real party piece, though, is its interior, which features exclusively touch, gesture, and voice controls. Everything from the infotainment, to the display, and even the gears are controlled by touch-screen. The T-Prime Concept GTE is bigger than the Touareg, and design elements are likely to find their way into all of their SUVs, of which there will be many. Volkswagen is also announcing that they expect to make an S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Audi Teases the e-tron’s Headlights Ahead of LA Reveal

Audi will unveil its new electric car, the e-tron GT, in just a few short days, but until then, it will do what manufacturers can’t help but do and will tease it mercilessly. The latest teaser images first appeared on Germany’s Bild , and feature some of the EV’s lighting. While the taillights look reasonably familiar, albeit on an interesting, angular surface, the headlights feature a heretofore unseen light shape. The X-shape (or maybe an R-shape, from the right angle) in the middle of the e-tron GT’s headlights set it apart from the rest of the lineup, even the e-tron SUV (whose lights look R8-ish with their angular check-shaped top line.) #Sneak Peek: the #Audi #etron GT concept – stay tuned for the big #world #premiere on November 28. pic.twitter.com/NIg0z6bIwR — AUDI AG (@Audi_Press) November 25, 2018 The long and low sedan will be based on the same platform as the Porsche Taycan, which is said to hit 60 mph in just 3.5 seconds and whose batteries will all be stowed...
Post a Comment
Read more