Concept cars are often beautiful, always ambitious and, for the most part, a car. The new concept Portal from Fiat-Chrysler on the other hand seems to consider the process of getting from A to B an afterthought and focuses almost entirely on the in-car experience. That said, being designed “by millennials, for millennials” this is hardly surprising, as by time most of them get behind the wheelautonomous carswill be swarming all over the roads.
What does this mean in practice? Basically the Portal is a hub for your social life, encouraging you to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) so you can connect up to eight devices to the car at once, which hook up to all your apps. At the CES 2017launch, the example used was hooking your baby monitor up to the car screen (although we advise not going for a drive while they snooze), or plugging in the Xbox. It also promises being able to connect to any platform so that if you switch from iOS to Android you’re sorted.
Other features include Personal Zoned Audio so you can zone out of Little Mix (or whatever kids listen to in the future) you can tune in to Metallica at the front, as well in-car cameras for carpool karaoke and wireless networking.
Connected features aside, it also has some pretty nifty hardware features inside and out, like 360-degree cameras instead of wing mirrors, removable seats for “expanding families” and biometrics to personalise your driving experience, which they callcontextual intelligence. It also has rather delightful colour changing lights on the outside to show other users whether you are driving it yourself or in autonomous mode.
Given the inevitable rise of self-driving cars, Fiat-Chrysler don’t see millennials putting too much weight behind 0-60mph times or top speeds, but for the record the Portal is fullyelectricand boasts an impressive 100kWh battery for 250-mile range and fast charging.
Hopefully we’ll see more exciting concept cars at CES 2017 so make sure you check out the rest of our coveragehere.
Check out more pictures of the Portal below:
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