Yesterday at the Frankfurt Motor Show, Porsche pulled the sheets off of their surprising Mission E concept car, an all-electric four-door clearly meant to do battle with Tesla.
While most are
focused on the car’s swoopy styling (it stands just 4’3” tall) and
theoretically quick charging time (15 minutes will get the battery to 80
percent), it was the UI/UX features that caught our eye.
Let’s start with the charging
process. A piece of the driver’s side quarter panel slides forward, revealing
an indicator gauge and a port to plug the cable into. Alternatively, Porsche
proposes that Mission E owners can have “a coil embedded in the floor of [their]
garage,” and simply charge the car wirelessly by parking over it. (We’re
guessing cat owners might want to discourage Tiger from hanging out under the
car while this is happening.)
Inside the car is an OLED instrument
cluster with a freaking eye-tracking system. According to Porsche, it “knows”
what instrument the driver is looking at, and pressing a button on the steering
wheel activates that instrument’s interactivity, allowing the driver to
navigate within it via “an interplay of eye-tracking and manual activation.”
You’ll notice in this shot that the
steering wheel blocks the view of portions of the instrument panel:
Porsche aims to get around this with
the eye-tracking gizmos and some fee-yancy display tricks:
The display follows the seat position and body attitude of the driver in what is known as a parallax effect. If the driver sits lower, higher or leans to one side, the 3D display of the round instruments reacts and moves with the driver. This eliminates situations in which the steering wheel blocks the driver's view of certain key information, for instance. All relevant information such as vehicle speed is always within the driver's line of sight.
Then it starts to get outright kooky,
with Porsche claiming the car will have…
…A holographic display that extends far into the passenger's side. It shows individually selectable apps, which are stacked in virtual space and arranged by priority with a three-dimensional effect. The driver – or passenger – can use these apps to touch-free control primary functions such as media, navigation, climate control, contacts and vehicle.
The desired symbol is activated by gestures that are detected by sensors. A grasping gesture means select, while pulling means control. Moreover, driver or passenger can use a touch display on the centre console to control secondary functions such as detailed information menus.
Unsurprisingly, there’s no rendering
showing the holographic interaction described above, nor the following feature,
which we can only describe as weird:
A camera mounted in the rear-view mirror recognizes the driver's good mood and shows it as an emoticon in the round instrument. The fun factor can be saved together with individual information such as the route or speed, and it can be shared with friends via a social media link.
Porsche has released performance
figures for the car that have got auto fans excited: A 500km (310 mile) range,
600 horsepower, 0-60 at around 3.5 seconds (a bit slower than the Tesla). But
the key numbers they haven’t released is how much the car would cost and what
date it would actually become a reality by.
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