Scenic routing to navigate the most epic roads on the planet
By: Anna Staley
Roads by Porsche lets drivers explore and record scenic tours, and share them with other drivers. The app maps the most epic routes on five continents, from driving though the the French Alps, to the Atomic Rim Ride in Canyonlands National Park, to up through the Stelvio Pass, Europe’s most spectacular ascent.
Every trip chronicles the towns along the way, photos from the drive, and a map of the route. Once you select a trip, the app dives into navigation mode guiding you with turn-by-turn directions. Drivers can rate and comment on each trip or can record driving their own favorite route, and upload to share it with other driving aficionados in the Roads by Porsche community.
“We created Roads by Porsche for those that simply love to drive, no matter what car brand preference. The app enables our community to access and shape a comprehensive catalogue of the world’s most exciting routes. Mapbox Navigation allowed us to bring this unique approach to life.” — Marco Brinkmann, Porsche
Porsche uses the Navigation SDK to embed the turn-by-turn for each trip into the app, giving drivers full control over the trip and seamless switching between navigation and browsing for new drives in the app. Porsche’s team used Studio to design a dark look and feel contrasting with the trip pictures and layering in subtle contour lines to highlight the topography of mountain tours.
The challenge for the developer team was to design for a community of drivers that doesn’t just want the fastest route from A to B, but the route that is most beautiful and the most fun to drive. Tapping into the flexibility of Mapbox Navigation, the Porsche, Interactive Pioneers and Mapbox teams were able to design beautiful and challenging routes using a lot of the customizing features.
“This app was truly a collaboration between teams. We were able to work quickly through our collaboration on Github. The advanced features of this app leverage the best of what is possible for pre-routed and driver recorded navigations. Drivers can record their own routes and share with other community members.” — Carlo Matic of Interactive Pioneers
Anyone can download the new Porsche app on iOS. And drop us a line to talk cars, maps, or anything else navigation and racing related to what we are building at Mapbox and with our partners.
Porsche Roads was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.