At their best, cars are deeply personal, intimate objects. They move us to where we want to go, they protect us and our riders along the way. Fundamentally, they represent the freedom to change our scenery, the joy of exploration, the rush of piloting a powerful machine.
But today, the focus of much of the attention in the automotive space is away from the personal, joyous element: Cars that don’t need drivers. Hailing a ride in a car that’s not yours. Optimizing a route to avoid congestion and shave off a minute or two. And even as auto has moved forward, the navigation experience largely hasn’t changed in decades.
We connected with Porsche over this challenge, and the opportunity to reimagine navigation in a way that surprises and delights — a human machine interface that is efficiently designed for drivers, navigating the curves and scenery of the world’s most thrilling drives.
We’re collaborating on a project to create a navigation experience that matches the soulfulness, excitement, and sheer joy of driving.
Porsche embodies this soul of driving. They built a company around speed, performance, and perfection — an attention to every detail of the car and the experience. When you think about Porsche, you think about drivers that never want to stop clasping the wheel because it’s so much fun to drive. They hope the journey never ends.
To make a navigation experience to match, their team understands that they have to flip so many of the paradigms of auto navigation as it exists today. These are big questions, and one of the things I love about working directly with the Porsche team including Gana Meissner, Director of UI/UX Design, and Hiep Bui Khac, Digital Product Designer, is the fact that we’re able to work so quickly through a lot of different hypotheses and guesses for what the space should really be.
With Porsche, we’re pulling from lots of the Mapbox platform — the Vision SDK for Augmented Reality Navigation, using Maps SDK for Unity for 3D route previews, Navigation SDK and Maps SDK for directions and sharing your route with others while driving, and Mapbox Studio to design a fully custom look and feel.
The Mapbox tools let designers and developers get hyper-specific about the attributes and the characteristics of their navigation experience. That flexibility is really crucial to curating your own experience that feels differentiated from others that you might find in automotive or mobile, to redefine what we expect from mobile and what the possibilities are in a car.
If you want to build a customized automotive experience, reach out to our team.
Like this article? Share it.
Maps feature data from Mapbox © Mapbox, OpenStreetMap © OpenStreetMap and their data partners, including Maxar (if applicable, © Maxar).
