Google Streetview Catches Porsche Prototypes Testing

How technology makes the world smaller.

It used to be that automakers could test their pre-production cars on the streets and all they really had to do was avoid the car paparazzi. After all, the average person on the street couldn't really do anything about it even if they knew what they had just seen. Nowadays, well, aren't we all being watched somehow by something? And everyone has a camera phone.

Here you get a spy photographer's bonanza spotted by that ubiquitous Internet search engine turned into mad mapper of the world: Google. These images were captured by Google Streetview. Google Streetview is a project by Google to photograph each street or road to go along with its extensive Google Maps project that is literally mapping out the globe.

These images, taken on Mount Evans Toll Road high up in the Colorado Rockies, show the next-generation Porsche Cayman and Boxster, as well as the face-lifted 911 Turbo and Targa. You can even see the Porsche engineers scrambling to cover up the cars once they spotted the cameras. Porsche was likely doing some high altitude testing there.

But it still takes a human eye to spot what the camera captures and we tip our hats to our colleagues over at garage419.com for having recognized what Google had inadvertently spotted.