It’s understandable that in a more “track-spec” vehicle there’s some sacrifices to be made in the name of weight saving, but we find it interesting that parking aids seem to be the first to go.
Even with the automatic front lift that remembers a few thousand locations, the 992 GT3 is not a car you want to be scraping the front of on bollards or steep driveways, but the slope of the bonnet and driving position can make it hard to gauge accurately where the very front of the car sits.
We’ve developed a front camera integration solution that aims to solve this. By showing a front camera display on the original screen and switching via factory controls, we’ve created a seamless add-on that won’t affect the user experience of these amazing cars.
The neat and tidy HD camera is a snug fit in the centre of the front grille, and provides a nice clear view of everything in front of the vehicle.
We chose a bracket-style camera for this to ensure we had some vertical adjustability on the camera vision, as capturing that lower lip of the splitter is critical for this upgrade to be worthwhile.
Having it sit in front of the grille also means that the bumper bar does not need to be removed for the installation, which is always a positive to us.
There are two small (around 3mm each) screw holes used to mount the camera, which is as minimally invasive as we could get things without compromising the strength of the camera mount.
The camera displays through the original screen, and control is done through factory buttons which means the only visible additon is the camera itself, for a true OEM-spec upgrade.
Keeping the camera-generated guidelines gives a nice visual indication of distance, especially since there are no parking sensors to speak of. The front splitter can be spotted just at the lower corners of the camera image, with the red guideline indicating a few inches in front of the car.
There’s a reasonable amount of work in getting to the head unit for us to interface with it, since Porsche seemed to build the entire dashboard around it, but we use OEM connections for everything so there’s no permanent or warranty affecting modification to any wiring or vehicle systems.
The camera will turn on when one of two things happens. For manual control, the camera can be switched on by holding down the back arrow on the steering wheel for a few seconds.
The camera also automatically turns on for 10 seconds when the car leaves reverse, to aid with tricky back-and-forth parking jobs.
We’ve kept this as simple as we can, since we’ve found that when camera systems get complicated to control, drivers stop using them.
For more information or a quote give us a call on 03 90787101 or use the contact tab.
