- Transportation
CarPlay is going to look insane on this thing.Oct 1, 2025, 3:31 PM UTCAndrew J. Hawkins is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.The Porsche Cayenne Electric won’t make its official debut until later this year. But in the meantime, the sports car maker is offering a hint of what’s to come with a detailed look at the new EV’s interior, including a curved OLED display that I think I can safely say is unique in the automotive world today.Porsche is calling it the Flow Display, a vertically installed screen that curves toward the bottom. It is both the largest screen ever to be featured in a Porsche and also the most unique. It will run on Porsche’s all new operating system, which the automaker claims will “flow” harmoniously throughout the vehicle’s interior.You can see how the screen functions move up and down the curved display in this TikTok from Autogefüehl.“Our goal was to combine quintessential Cayenne characteristics and the newly developed display surfaces with the features of the new ‘Porsche Digital Interaction’ into a harmonious overall package,” Markus Auerbach, director of interior design at Style Porsche, said in a press release. “One that’s innovative, forward-thinking and meticulously thought through down to the finest detail.”Porsche isn’t revealing the measurements of the screen, most likely because the bend makes it difficult. (Electrek says it spans nearly 42 inches.) But the new Cayenne will also have a 14.25-inch instrument cluster, a heads-up display, and an optional 14.9-inch passenger screen for video streaming and app control functions.In some sense, we knew this was coming. As far back as 2023, Porsche’s chair of the executive board, Oliver Blume (who also serves as Volkswagen Group’s CEO), was promising a “completely new experience” in the interior of the sports car maker’s new EV lineup. Porsche is now delivering on that promise, while also striking a new one: the wholesale “reinvention” of the interior experience. (As my colleague Marina Galperina rightfully asks, why must everything be an “experience” these days? Other automakers are also guilty of overusing this term.)To be sure, Porsche had to go big with the Cayenne. The all-new Macan crossover EV has been a big winner, despite Porsche logging an overall drop in sales in the first half of the year. But while its gas car sales have dropped, its EV and plug-in hybrid vehicles have been on a winning streak, up 14.5 percent in the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2024.The new Flow Display could certainly give the new Cayenne a boost when it goes on sale next year. But it could also make it a tough sell with anyone experiencing screen fatigue, who maybe desire more buttons and tactile controls. Surveys routinely show that car shoppers are over the Tesla-inspired minimalism of the modern interior and are ready to bring back physical buttons.Porsche claims the new Cayenne prioritizes driver engagement with a new AI-powered voice assistant, as well as a compliment of physical buttons for HVAC, volume control, and window defroster. The voice assistant can “reliably” understand complex instructions and spontaneous follow-up questions without repeating the activation word. The voice assistant controls climate, seat heating, and ambient lighting, while also recognizing addresses, points of interest, and traffic information.Considering Porsche is on tap to receive Apple’s newly immersive CarPlay Ultra, one wonders how phone mirroring will work with this massive curved display. The current iteration of CarPlay seems to work fine on the Flow Display, as shown in Autogefüehl’s TikTok. We’ll have to wait and see how its more deeply integrated successor does with the bend.Porsche joins Mercedes-Benz and BMW in trying to reinvent the interior experience in order to better compete with the influx of high-tech Chinese EVs. Other brands, like Sony and Honda’s Afeela, are putting media, video streaming, and gaming at the center of their marketing pitch to customers, which is in anticipation of autonomous driving eventually making the need to pay attention to the road obsolete.Most Popular
Source: theverge.com
