Here's a bit of next-level product placement for you. Porsche has let part of its design team off the chain to co-design a spaceship for the upcoming Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker movie. Meet the Tri-Wing S91X Pegasus Starfighter.
What fun this project must have been. The Porsche guys outside Stuttgart worked together with Lucasfilm designers in San Francisco for two months to get the tiniest bit of recognizable Porsche DNA into the movie.
The Pegasus, a "new republic light assault starship" piloted by the good guys, has lines around its headlights to echo the droopy teardrop of the Taycan's headlight cutouts. It's got a gently tapering cockpit design and 911-style buttresses toward the back, surrounding the little droid co-pilot; indeed, the whole thing seems very aerodynamic for something that spends most of its time in the void of space.
The pilot-centric three-seat cabin layout owes more to Gordon Murray or the McLaren Speedtail than to any Porsche, but we won't dwell on that.
Really the only thing people are likely to register even on the most subliminal of levels would be the four-lens headlights on this thing, which echo the Taycan's distinctive headlight clusters. They're echoed at the back of the ship, albeit turned on their sides, and the effect is nice enough that we wonder if we might see them on the back of a Porsche soon.
One wonders how much money changed hands for this tiny branding nod. The team has built a 1.5-meter (5-foot) long model of the ship, which will be in show at the movie's premiere in LA.
It's a weird idea, and a strangely subtle little bit of crass product placement, but the Porsche team's reverence and excitement for the Star Wars world is palpable, and the result is an elegant, fast-looking spaceship to add to the long catalogue of iconic Star Wars vehicles like the X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Millennium Falcon, Star Destroyer and dozens of others. Time will tell if it sticks in the culture the way those others have.
If you're a fan of Porsche, Lucasfilm or design itself, you might enjoy this video following the collaboration, which also shows some footage of the thing in flight, that I don't believe has been in any of the trailers thus far.
Source: Porsche