If you keep up with spy shots of upcoming cars, then you may have noticed a trend with Porsche’s fleet. Many automakers wrap their cars in swirls and intricate patterns to try to distract the eye, but Porsche takes a different tactic: It clads its prototypes in flat black and then places stickers that look like headlights and taillights over the vehicle’s actual lighting. These faux designs have the effect of disguising the car’s actual fascias from a distance, to the point where you might assign the vehicles in question to a completely different brand. That’s exactly why the Cayenne EV prototypes have Hyundai-esque pixel-light decals on the back, according to Porsche itself.
Recently, while in Spain to sample Porsche’s next EV, we caught up with Sascha Niesen, the manager of verification and validation for Cayenne prototypes. Basically, he’s the guy in charge of the fleet. Sascha answered all our burning questions, starting with: Why the big fake headlights? Why not just do what every other brand does, and drape an entire car in one of those “Magic Eye” visual illusion prints that were all the rage in the ’90s?
“Well, there’s two options,” Niesen explained. “Either you have a previous vehicle that you want to look like this one, or you want it to look like something completely different.”
Niesen called out the front of the Cayenne prototype. “So this one—obviously this is shaped like a real headlight, right? That’s an existing [design], and you want to distract from the obvious fact that there’s a new one. If you see the car coming from a distance, it’s a weird shape and also something kind of familiar.”
Then, Niesen directed our attention to the rear. “On the light bar in the back, that’s something not from any Porsche. It kind of looks like an Ioniq 5. So that’s just to distract people from the fact that it is a Porsche light bar underneath.”
If you follow Porsche’s design trajectory from the last decade or so until today, you’ll notice it’s been flattening its headlights. The classic ovals gave way to fried-egg-evoking triangles on the Macan and 718, which were then squished down into squircles for cars like the current Cayenne and Taycan. The units on Porsche’s latest cars, like the Macan EV, are slimmer still, and the electric Cayenne is following that theme. “You want to distract from the fact that it is actually a very slim light,” Niesen said. “So you’ve just increased the size by putting big camo on it.”
In this Cayenne’s case, Porsche literally took an image of a predecessor model’s headlight and scaled it up until it dwarfed the smaller, real unit. “You can tell that it’s a Porsche, so it wouldn’t make sense to use a headlight from somebody else,” Niesen said. “But you need to use something that looks like a headlight. You can’t just put a BMW headlight on our car, right? Just use an existing one. Just enlarge it and stretch it out.”
Niesen told us that Porsche’s prototypes get their fair share of attention in the wild, but often for the wrong reasons.
“I have all kinds of funny stories,” he said. “People coming to me like, ‘Oh, were you in an accident?’ Because there’s a lot of tape on the car. It’s like, ‘No, don’t worry, it’s not been in an accident.’ Especially in the U.S., because people tend to tape everything. There’s your mirror just hanging off. ‘Oh, just put some tape on it. It’s fine.'”
Naturally, this being Porsche, even a decision as simple as pasting fake headlights on a test vehicle isn’t rushed—it’s still subject to an approval process.
“What usually happens is that when there is a draft for a camouflage design, it’s going to be signed off by [Porsche Executive Board member for Research and Development] Michael Steiner himself,” Niesen said. “He’s going to get different drafts sent to him, and then he’s going to sign off on one, and then they’re going to put it on one car and show him, and then it’s going to end up on the real car. Same if we introduce new camo stages—the last one is always going to run through him, and he’s going to say, ‘Yeah, that’s fine. We’re going to use it like this.’ Or, ‘No, we have to change something. We don’t want to show whatever part of the car.'”
At the end of the day, Porsche’s strategy of keeping these wraps simple seems to work for it, and it’s hard to argue with Niesen’s rationale. “All black is the best camo anyway. To be honest, we don’t really know why other companies are doing that weird zebra thing on their prototypes because it just screams, ‘Hello, I’m a prototype.’ It makes everyone stare.
“For us, it’s always just black. There’s different stages of this. Before this one, [we] used to have hardcover parts over the doors. We were driving to Sweden on a joint test trip with a Cariad test vehicle, and they were running an Audi Q6 with the zebra camouflage. We were at a charging stop waiting for the ferry to go to Sweden. And we had three Porsches charging and the one Audi vehicle, and there were people just walking by the Porsches, and then they see the Audi and go, ‘Oh, there’s a prototype!'”
Got a tip? Let us know at [email protected]
Comments