This design doesn’t scream sexy at all.
Sometimes the creative process for developing cars can take odd turns, yet the public never knows because preliminary designs are locked away tight, never to be revealed. Recently, Porsche’s been giving us a peek behind the curtain with some amazing and odd concepts never before unveiled. One of those, the Porsche Vision Renndienst, is especially shocking.
Unlike the hypercar concepts Porsche also recently revealed, few will find this all-electric van to be genuinely sexy. It’s a thing of utility smoothed out at the edges to ape sportiness, but it’s an ineffective attempt. Quite frankly, there’s absolutely nothing about the design which would even indicate it’s a Porsche. Perhaps the fact it’s patterned after a Volkswagen Type 2 or VW Bus has something to do with the out-of-place look of the thing.
Translated from German, “Renndienst” means “racing service.” Back in the day, Porsche used a few Volkswagen Buses as racing support vehicles, one of which you can see pictured alongside the concept. One might think Ferdinand Porsche himself designed the Type 2 like he did the Type 1 and that’s why Porsche pursued this concept, but the Volkswagen Beetle design was forcefully used by the Nazi socialist government at the time, which was about the extent of Ferdinand’s involvement with the “People’s Car.”
So you start to see how awry this whole design study was pretty much from the get-go, and it’s no wonder the thing never saw production. We can only imagine the extreme revulsion of Porsche diehards had that happened.
The Porsche PR team certainly puts a good spin on the Vision Renndienst, calling it s a “futuristic space shuttle with exciting proportions.” Then there’s some nonsense about how Porsche DNA was successfully transferred to an “unknown vehicle segment for the brand.” Nope, not buying that for one minute.
Porsche doesn’t show off the interior, but it apparently features a central driver’s seat and a modular cabin, so maybe like Ikea furniture? The number of seats isn’t specified, leaving one to wonder if this would have been the first and only three-row Porsche production vehicle.
