Porsche Taycan World Premiere: Live AR Show

Same shape, new soul.

The Taycan was Porsche's first all-electric sports car, premiered live at the IAA 2019 in Frankfurt. From the outside it read like any other Porsche — the change was the part you could not see: an all-new electric platform, for a clientele raised on combustion engines. So we turned the stage into a live augmented-reality show and put the invisible on it, in the same space as the presenter — the platform, the charging, the aerodynamics, the car opened right up.

On stage: the presenter and the Taycan share the space — its systems opened up in AR

One stage, shared with the invisible.

What made it a show and not a slideshow: the presenter and the Taycan stood in the same space, and AR opened the car up live — the electric platform, the 800-volt system, the power transmission — the inner workings a camera crane could never reach, revealed at the moment someone was talking the audience through them.

Out into its ecosystem.

An electric car's value also lives outside the bodywork. The show followed the Taycan into the things a stage cannot normally hold — how it charges, how air moves across it — and set it against a virtual rival, so its acceleration and roll stability were something you watched rather than figures on a chart. Perspectives no real camera could hold, kept steady in AR.

Roll stability, staged as a live driving moment

A film passes by.
Live, you witness it.

We could have shot this as a film. But a film just passes by — you never give it the attention you give something happening in the room with you. Augmented reality puts the presenter in the same space as the car and its invisible systems, and turns a launch into something closer to theatre: it is live, so it carries risk, and the risk is what makes you lean in. You are not watching a recording of the unseen — you are witnessing it, in front of your own eyes, as it happens.

Most products now carry an invisible dimension that holds much of their value. AR is how you make it visible, live, next to the person telling the story. That Porsche chose this medium, at this moment, was part of the message — but the point was never spectacle. It was understanding.