Like its cars, Porsche’s design process combines innovation and tradition.
Porsche has been creating some of the world’s most desired and celebrated luxury performance cars for over 75 years, and in that time, its design process has evolved to fit the manufacturer’s ethos: celebrating and honoring tradition, while pioneering and innovating engineering, luxury, and performance. Today, Porsche proudly boasts a design process that is “the best of both worlds” with traditional and cutting-edge methods combining to create timelessly beautiful and futuristic designs that honor the unmistakable charm of its historic vehicles.
Michael Mauer, Style Porsche’s Vice President, says that “there is no analog versus digital, but rather analog and digital. The two approaches complement each other and both have their advantages and disadvantages.” What this means is that the first step of design happens in the most traditional way possible, with a pen and a clean sheet of paper. After that, another well-known traditional automotive design method is used, the creation of a clay (industrial plasticine) model. According to Style Porsche Director of Design Models, Martin Kahl, the sensory aspect of the physical model, made of over a ton of plasticine material, is paramount to the process.
Along with traditional methods, the months-long iterative design process also involves contemporary, cutting-edge digital design methods. An advantage to the digital process is that the prototype (an 18-gigabyte virtual model with up to 50 million polygons,) can be easily compared in a photorealistic virtual environment to its predecessor, or the other vehicles in the model lineup. Gaming-derived, high-end virtual reality software is involved to help designers go into great detail, and as development progresses, analog and digital methods are used back and forth to finalize a stunning design.
The final phase sees the hardware of the design come to fruition, and at this part of the process in Weissach at Porsche’s design studio opened in 2014, prototypes are brought into the sunlight to confirm how they would look in the real and natural world. With the highest quality of both traditional and modern design methods involved in the process of creating Porsche cars, Porsche effortlessly honors its long-standing tradition and heritage and also introduces pioneering technology, engineering excellence, and cutting-edge performance.
Image Source: Porsche