Add it up: four students at the Institut Superieur de Design in France, some complex modeling software, and the desire to come up with a super slippery Porsche. What do you get from that? This: the Porsche Carma Concept. The task was to create a car that cheated the wind in new ways, yet remained a Porsche in design and engine placement.
The body of the car seems to take a lot of cues from a lot of different cars, and frankly doesn’t look much like a Porsche above the beltline — in a Cayenne/Panamera world, what does any more? — but that’s not to say it’s not a good looking car. We’d take one.
Aerodynamically, the car has a flat floor with two tunnels running the length of the body. But its most interesting feature might be the 928-esque rear end cap that extends slightly at speed to let air flow into the bodywork, where it passes over an internal spoiler and exits at the rear. Not that we’re against those QE2-sized planks adorning some of the faster Porsches these days, but it is a very elegant solution to rear end lift. It will also make the car feel less like overkill when you’re just popping down to 7-11 at 25 MPH for some morning coffee. In fact, if it actually works, we won’t take one. We’ll take three. Check out the video at the Carma Concept site, and be sure to check out hi-res pics of the car below.
Though the Porsche Panamera’s exterior has been shot extensively by spy photographers, the interior has remained much more elusive. Leave it to Brenda Priddy & Co. to end the mystery. Here we have what are believed to be the first interior shots of Porsche’s four-door coupe, and what they show is a domicile that’s one-part Porsche and one-part electronics store. Seriously, it looks like a Best Buy threw up on the dash. The center console is dominated by a big navi screen that’s surrounded by tiny buttons - so German. Below that is something we can’t quite make out. It looks like the HVAC controls with two large but flat knobs flanking a small display. Though the pics are blurry, you can clearly make out red and blue lines, which usually indicate hot and cold temperatures on an HVAC system. The gauges themselves appear to be the same as those found in other Porsches like the Cayenne, with two large gauges for the tach and speedo that frame a smaller information display. Two more smaller gauges hang out on either side, as well. The floor-mounted shifter, meanwhile, is nestled between two rows of four buttons each. Immediately aft of the shifter is an i-Drive like knob and another big red button, probably for the ejector seat. We kid, we kid. There are no doubt elements in this particular interior that are present for testing purposes only and won’t be found in the final production version.